The Lovers (Azazel Jacobs, 2017)

Debra Winger and Tracy Letts in The Lovers

Cast: Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, Melora Walters, Tyler Ross, Jessica Sula. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Production design: Sue Tebbutt. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

Azazel Jacobs's The Lovers has a premise that sounds very French: A middle-aged married couple, each of whom has a lover, has decided to separate. But all of a sudden they discover that their old passion for each other has flared up again. As a result, they begin lying to their lovers to cover up their reheated marriage. But these are not Parisian sophisticates, they're American suburbanites. The couple, Mary (Debra Winger) and Michael (Tracy Letts), are cubicle-dwellers in tedious office jobs; their respective lovers, Robert (Aidan Gillen) and Lucy (Melora Walters), bring a little artsy glamour to their lives -- Robert is a writer and Lucy a dancer. Mary and Michael have promised their lovers that they will separate after their  college-age son, Joel (Tyler Ross), comes for a visit with his girlfriend, Erin (Jessica Sula). Joel has been witness to the tension in his parents' marriage, which he blames on his father, and he warns Erin that it will not be a pleasant visit. But Erin finds them to be warmly affectionate, which in its turn causes tension between her and Joel. Meanwhile, Robert and Lucy, both frustrated by the delay in the separation of Mary and Michael, begin to act out: Robert confronts Michael in a supermarket, and the volatile Lucy actually hisses at Mary when she sees her -- an event witnessed by Erin. Unfortunately, Jacobs can't find an easy way to resolve this crisis and the very promising film begins to fall apart. From the outset, in fact, the film feels a little off in tone, as if it's not quite sure when or whether we're supposed to laugh at the situations the characters fall into. For one thing, it's overlaid with and sometimes smothered by a lush, romantic, symphonic score by Mandy Hoffman that often seems at odds with what's happening on screen. Defenders of the film say that these are directorial choices designed to be unsettling, but I have to wonder why Jacobs chose this particular story to unsettle us with. 

The Lovers (Louis Malle, 1958)

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory in The Lovers

Jeanne Tournier: Jeanne Moreau
Bernard Dubois-Lambert: Jean-Marc Bory
Henri Tournier: Alain Cuny
Maggy Thiebaud-Leroy: Judith Magre
Raoul Florès: José Luis de Villalonga
Coudray: Gaston Modot

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louise de Vilmorin
Based on a novel by Dominique Vivant
Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Anna Karenina without the train. That's one way of looking at Louis Malle's once-scandalous but now somewhat tepid The Lovers. That seems to be the way the German censors saw it: a story about a woman who abandons not only her husband but also her child, and seemingly gets away with it. In the German release, the scenes involving Jeanne Tournier's daughter were cut, as if the idea of a mother leaving so adorable a child was too horrible for audiences to contemplate. In the United States, of course, it was the depiction of sex -- not "cutting away to the window" as Malle once described the traditional approach to sex scenes -- that caused the censors to draw their knives. The result was the Supreme Court decision that The Lovers didn't fit Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." He didn't, and it isn't: What we see in the scene are a briefly flashed nipple and the look on Jeanne's face as Bernard brings her to orgasm. Even the fact that she is being pleasured orally by him is only implied by his absence in the frame. The Lovers is more satiric than erotic, its targets the stale marriages and pro forma affairs of an haute bourgeoisie obsessed with hairstyles and polo games. Malle attempts to contrast the sterile dalliances of the idle rich with the more spontaneous relationship between Jeanne and Bernard, a casually dressed archaeologist who drives a clunky tin-can Citroën, but the film gets a little too formulaic, especially in the lushly romantic moonlight stroll and boat ride that serves as foreplay to the consummation of their affair. He switches back to irony at the end: Jeanne and Bernard escape together under the astonished gaze of her husband and her other lover, but we sense their uncertainty about whether it will work, anticipating the way Mike Nichols tempered romance with reality by holding the camera just a little bit too long on Benjamin and Elaine after they escape from the church in The Graduate (1967). Maybe we don't see the train but we hear it approaching.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies