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Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

One of Louis Malle's sterling juvenilia made at the age of 25, his second feature film after ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (also stars Ms. Moreau), released the same year in 1958. THE LOVERS notches up the Special Jury Prize in Venice Film Festival and puts his leading lady's name on the French cinematic map, who would become a prominent face of the forthcoming NOUVEAU VAGUE.In THE LOVERS, Moreau plays Jeanne, the trophy wife of Henri Tournier (Cuny), a newspaper owner, they live in a countryside mansion near Dijon with a young daughter. After 8 years, their conjugal bond is strained because Henri habitually neglects her and sinks his teeth into work, to keep herself busy, Jeanne often commutes between home and Paris, where she stays with her childhood friend Maggy (Magre, who plays up the stuck-up Parisienne type), and strikes up an affair with a Spanish aristocrat, the polo-playing Raoul (de Vulallonga), who is smitten with her.But, that cannot slake Jeanne's cosmic bourgeois ennui, she has a perfect life but has nothing else to focus on outside her dead-end marriage and genteel fling, domestic discord ratchets up when Henri becomes more and more passive-aggressive in the manner of treating her, carps about her over-frequent excursions to Paris, and demands her to host a dinner party in their home with Maggy and Raoul invited, because the latter, is a man he has yet met, but whom his wife cannot praise enough.En route from Paris to home on the day of the dinner party, Jeanne's car breaks down and she hitchhikes with a passing stranger Bernard (Bory), a young and brusque archaeologist, who doesn't like speeding and has an errand to run before driving her to home, by which time, both her guests have already arrived. Out of courtesy, Henri invites Bernard to stay overnight, and the dinner, is as tedious as Jeanne has envisioned, Henri and Raoul's men's talk has worn thin quickly (noticeably, Bernard remains entirely silent during the dinner conversation in his formality). But under the magic spell of the moonlight, during an unplanned saunter nearby the mansion with Bernard, Jeanne's passion has been invigorated, their nocturnal foreplay has been tantalizingly relayed from woods (the touch of hands), to the boat (the kiss) floating on a quaint brook, finally to her bedroom, accompanied by Brahm's thematic music, Malle majestically hones the romantic atmosphere to consummate the anonymity of eroticism - two strangers, tossed together solely by their physical entanglement and declare "love" against the whole established world, what a cathartic occasion and at the same time, how desperate and entrapped a woman can be, intuits her knight-in-shining- armor like that? A slap on the face of bourgeois ennui, but also, Malle leaves his doubt near the end (through the movie's lucid and consistent third-person voice-over), there is no happily-ever- after awaits for the newly-paired lovers, they will face the music, one day but not today, la fin.Jeanne Moreau proffers a more relatable enactment than Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel's BELLE DE JOUR (1967), as a woman lost in her aimlessness borne out of the encroaching contentment in her material lives, and tries to locate an outlet by liberating her sexual prowess, here, Jeanne's endeavor is comparatively more out-of-the-blue than shocking, and it is very clear, Bernard is just a romantic foil cropping up in the right time, right place (like the intruded bird during their dinner), his individuality never counts in Jeanne's yearning of running away and starting anew, except that, he can make her laugh, potently testified by her hysterical jag of guffaw (a metaphor of potency which can penetrate her state of normalcy). THE LOVERS, is a handsome black-and- white oldie permeated with Gallo-frame-of-mind and pristine coutures, slightly teeters on naïve escapism, but enormously engrossing to behold like a dream you don't want it to end.

I know it's not fair to criticize a film because of its basic milieu. Jeanne Moreau is a rich woman who has probably married for money. Her husband is a clueless bore who runs a newspaper. They are extremely rich, with cooks and housemaids, and lots of time to get in trouble. He doesn't seem to have much affection for her (although she is a knockout) and encourages her to go to Paris and hang around with her equally useless friend. There she meets a polo player and he offers her some adventure, though when push comes to shove, he's not much different than her husband. The hard thing for me is that I couldn't care less what happens to her. She has pretty much all she wants and, I believe, a dolt of husband who must know she is having contact with men on the make. Things change when, after her car breaks down, a professor rescues her and then accompanies her back to her home. All participants in the drama are there: the husband, the polo player, and the vapid friend. Because this new guy is aggressive and not willing to cotton to her spoiled brat being, she finds him irresistible. LIke a dog on the prowl, he quickly seduces her and within one night, they are talking about running off together. Moreau is beautiful. That's about it. There is a very sexy scene for its time. The movie, for me, is utterly lacking in any semblance of real interaction. How can these people co-exist? Visually, it is quite well done and Louis Malle is a great director, but... For a moment, I hearkened back to the final scene in "The Graduate" as Katherine Ross and Dustin Hoffmann sit in the back of the bus, wondering what the future will bring.

This is the story of Jeanne Tournier, a bored upper class woman who tries to escape her situation through romantic love. While it would be unfair to expect the depth of character development in this movie to match that in the similarly plotted novels "Madame Bovary" or "Lady Chatterley's Lover," this presentation seems particularly thin.Some half century on this movie has lost some of its punch. Apparently it was considered to be sexually avant-garde at the time of its release, but it would probably get a PG-13 rating now. There are things that make this worth seeing. As Jeanne Tournier, Jeanne Moreau does turn up the heat and her fans will want to see this. There is some nice black and white camera work. There are a lot of night scenes (filmed day for night, as Malle comments on the DVD extras) that are atmospheric and augment the intimate scenes.While the erotic scenes might not jar, a shocking thing even for contemporary audiences is the fact that Jeanne would take off and leave her child behind. Also Jeanne engages in two adulterous affairs without remorse--that would have had 1950s audiences talking, and some contemporary audiences as well. Thinking about the future of the renegade couple, I think it will not take Jeanne and her lover long to realize that she is taking her boredom with her.

Louis Malle had quite a running start in his mid-20's. Following the amazing noir feature Elevator at the Gallows- so hip and cool a film that Miles Davis himself did the score- Malle made The Lovers, a drama about a bored and unfulfilled housewife who has a one-night fling with a man she just met by the side of the road and decides to leave her husband and child for him. This is trivializing, of course, what is an incredibly potent and incredibly bittersweet tale that features a filmmaker so confident with his craft already that romance fills any scene that's required like a shotgun aimed directly at its target. When its at its best, The Lovers reminds us why we love watching people falling in love in the movies (or what the characters think in a moment of passion, as does happen in French films since they are some of the best at it), and as a kicker Malle adds a catch, something that elevates it from something more cynical in tone.The main character Jeanne, played by Jeanne Moreau, is married to Henri, who works well enough that she lives pretty much as a bourgeois. She also has a man on the side, a polo sportsman, and sees him from time to time at sort of programmed-to-be-fun locations like an amusement park. She's obviously unhappy, and one might find this looking at it today to look a little dated, like "oh, she's unhappy, she'll go find someone, I've seen this before." And, in fact, she does find someone else, or rather completely by accident or chance or whichever you'd be willing to pick. Her car breaks down on route to a dinner party with her husband and other friends, and a man, Bernard (Bory), a relative of someone in the bourgeois circle but not one himself, picks her up and drives her there. He is invited to dinner and stay the night, and it's here where we see the two have an incredible and deep connection.I should stop now since I've given away whatever sort of "plot" there is here. The Lovers is foremost a character piece, and Malle knows this so he makes it an incredibly rich film of character. We're not seeing just the basics of people like an unfaithful wife or hard-working and bitter husband or sweet woman best-friend to Jeanne or a stuffy Polo guy or even a dashing man out of the blue. There's a lot more nuance to it than that, more that's tucked under and given clarity by the little moments that threaten to shake everything up, be it just a fly in the room or a bat flying in through the window during dinner, or a mention of a time at an amusement park.One can have an moral problem with what Jeanne does, which is leaving her husband and child for a man she just met. Logically, it's absurd and wrong and all that jazz... but when it's filmed and presented like this, it becomes like a hyper-realistic tale, something that should be fantasy but is too real for these characters to pass off. Part of this is how it's filmed and timed. Henri Decae does the cinematography, and with one or two exceptions (in nit-pick fashion I spotted a boom mic in a couple of scenes that made me feel uneasy for such a highly regarded film, which of course passed), it's gorgeously filmed with light streaming in in that last third with Jeanne and Bernard in the garden and in the bedroom at night, given that hyper-realistic sensation that only happens in heightened romance in movies but made earthy and passionate because of the sincerity of the actors.The other part, I must mention, is Jeanne Moreau. She is one of the most captivating and desirable actresses in the past 50 years, but part of that is even as she is fairly young here (late 20s or just turning 30), something about her face looks older, more experienced in the world, weary. Maybe it's just for the character, but it's something about her that makes this and other parts she played in this star-making period so wonderful. Another actress might have made Jeanne look more unsympathetic. Moreau keeps us thinking about what her character may be thinking, disheartened by life and then rejuvenated by some possibility that terrifies her even more (watch her in the last couple of scenes, it's staggering work in the subtlest of ways), or if something with her character has made her react or feel a way that is only possible because she is playing it a certain way. There's magnetism to her here, which goes a great to making the "hot" scenes with her and her partner so memorable.It's precisely un-pornographic, as if I need to point it out following the Supreme Court's ruling that it was *not* pornographic precisely because the Judge "saw it as such", because of the filmmaker's connection and care for his characters even as they're doing possibly foolish and irreversible choices. It's liberating still 51 years later to see characters allowed to be this passionate and erotic on camera - whatever minor flaws, this has more love and lust going on than 2 dozen rom-coms in America as of late with usually not much regard to the way people actually react and think when thrown into romantic peril. At any rate, Happy Valentine's Day!