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Very disappointing...

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Pretty Good

As Good As It Gets

it is its virtue. and its purpose. not to impress or to be remarkable. only a nice mixture of color, joy, music,crumbs of comedy and lovely actors. and it is enough. a film of Ingrid Bergman. and Jean Marais. Mel Ferrer and Juliette Greco as perfect spice. and few adorable scenes. a film of romance, songs and joy. short, a Jean Renoir and piece of a long chain of period. an oasis. not complicated, not really bad, far to be boring. charming at whole. and, sure, full of lovely situations. a film who remembers a special lost sensitivity. and nothing more. because, as Disney creations, essence in this case is the spell. the delicate and precise magic. and mission is complete.

Renoir introduces Elena as a "fantasy musical". The opening scene is in an artist's studio while a piano is practiced on. There is a superior use of depth of field but Bergman is the focal point (Renoir was quite smitten with her as evidenced by their years of personal communication). There are shades of Nana however that may have marred positive response to the film upon release. Bergman's character is not imbued with a clear motivation that brings everything around her into focus. It is simply her external self that is to be that which is focused upon. Well, that wasn't good enough in 1926 and nothing much had changed thirty years later. Is Bergman's Elena a symbol or a mere good luck charm? Hard to tell at first viewing. Again multiple cuts replace the long take and tableau construction of mise-en-scene replaces mobile framing. Elena is certainly not in the realm of 'realism' attributed to Regle. Point in case is when an old military jacket is commented as being tattered yet is clearly immaculate and freshly dry-cleaned at the other end of the studio minutes before. The immaculate mise-en-scene of the color "trilogy" is a psychologically-based construction and operates as a reflective process for the spectator to find pleasure in an unblemished vision. In effect, Renoir has shifted from letting a story tell itself through his direction to directing how the story is projected. "Everyone has their plans" replaces the old Renoir credo of "everyone has their reasons" and the distinction fits nicely with my own thesis about Renoir's two stylistic systems. In Carrefour, the camera investigates through the lattice work of a door window creating a layered space whereas in Elena an idle courter bangs in futility at a door with similar lattice but no great depth of field. For Faulkner, it is a conflict of private and public spheres at play where the woman's power is effected through performance. It seems unlikely that this theory plays out cleanly given Renoir's consistency with empowering female characters through a variety of means. The film has more significance and less entertainment value the more you know and understand of Renoir's oeuvre.

I think that most of the folks who have posted comments on this movie don't understand how to watch a movie and/or have little sense of elegance. First, to assess a movie you need to understand the extent to which everything in the film works together. Modern sensibilities demand great drama. No, I don't mean great setting of characters and plots, but they seem to demand emotional trajectories that are greatly tragic or greatly comedic. This is a subtle movie. Its beauty lies in its subtlety (not to be confused with simplicity). Neither the story nor the characters are simple in this movie. It is a beautifully filmed movie that makes the most of combining sensuousness, politics, human weakness, venality...you name it. The world it's set in would be alien and not understood today...a world where if you have it you have to flaunt it NOW and LOUDLY, even if you only think you have it.Many people today don't understand that Victorian society wasn't really Victorian as people understand that term today.This movie helps set the record straight.

The first half hour or so of this movie I liked. The obvious budding romance between Ingrid Bergman and Mel Ferrer was cute to watch and I wanted to see the inevitable happen between them. However, once the action switched to the home of Ingrid's fiancé, it all completely fell apart. Instead of romance and charm, we see some excruciatingly dopey parallel characters emerge who ruin the film. The fiancé's boorish son and the military attaché's vying for the maid's attention looked stupid--sort of like a subplot from an old Love Boat episode. How the charm and elegance of the first portion of the film can give way to dopiness is beyond me. This film is an obvious attempt by Renoir to recapture the success he had with THE RULES OF THE GAME, as the movie is very similar once the action switches to the country estate (just as in the other film). I was not a huge fan of THE RULES OF THE GAME, but ELENA AND HER MEN had me appreciating the artistry and nuances of the original film.