---is what many an adult woman might call the result when a man she loves develops a romantic entanglement with what we call a child (in any case, as in this one, a little girl). Generally presumed to be sexual on its face, such a relationship seldom involves actual sex, but always an emotional intensity which is often, even commonly lacking from the carnal attractions of a man and woman. It is this the grown woman cannot engender, thus she envies the little girl who can. Ironically, the younger female is jealous of the older woman's capacity to possess the man sexually, and has little need nor understanding of the more complex feelings the man might have for her. Needful of both, the man usually ends up with neither, as the battle of the sexes AND the dictates of society practically foreordain.
So it is with Hardy Kruger and Patricia Gozzi, star (actually railroad station)-crossed lovers in Sundays and Cybele. Kruger served as a fighter pilot in the French air force in Indo China (Vietnam), and was wounded and traumatized in a crash in which a little Asian girl was killed. Gozzi as we meet her is being dumped in an orphanage in a Paris suburb by her harried father, who tells her it's only temporary but actually plans to abandon her, a fact which Kruger learns from eavesdropping and a letter. He follows father and daughter to the orphanage from the train station, a regular hangout of his, and notes that the father hurries off before a nun answers the door. Later he goes back, poses as the father to get the girl out on Sunday afternoons, for outings in the local area and, though it is winter and most uninviting a venue in which to form a friendship, in a park. The girl, desperately lonely, goes along with the deception, senses wound and need in the Kruger character matching her own, and they form a strongly symbolic and generally childish friendship.
Alas, Kruger lives with a girlfriend, a nurse, and she is a knockout who knows his history and has taken it upon herself to restore the man she loves to health. Alack, it's no use. Kruger retreats from her, steadily and completely, to his fantasy relationship with the child. He is troubled by dreams and flashbacks, and noises set him off. He begins to frighten the child on the Sunday outings as she divines the extent of his mental problems, so she decides they should be "married." Others in the park and on the street pick up on the liaison, and assume the worst, which sets off a chain of events that turn the "wedding ceremony" into a tragedy.
Sundays and Cybele is one of a long line of international movies that misses the boat in depicting adult/child romantic attachments, tailoring the plot elements to conform with popular notions of both the adult and the child which are at best misguided, and at worst, as in this case, a guarantee of unpleasantness and tragedy. The adult in these films, from Peter Lorre in 'M' to the chimney sweep in Emma's Shadow to the Ian Holm portrayal of Lewis Carroll in Dreamchild to Louis Gossett Jr. in Sudie & Simpson, must either be severely neurotic, a social or racial outcast, mentally retarded or outright psychotic. The child must be unloved and neglected, because how else (or why) could the adult manage to seduce or coerce the child into a relationship? "Just another love story" these tales might really be, but we have a deep need to see them as aberrations distinctly outside the pale, needful of retribution, punishments of both adult and child and, as happened to the Kruger character, needful of being put to death to insure the end of the relationship (or, as happened to Dirk Bogarde in Death In Venice, struck dead by the force of his own perversion and lustful iniquity).
So Sundays and Cybele conforms, and it is to the credit of all concerned in the filming, particularly the 12-year-old Patricia Gozzi and director Serge Bourguignon, that it rises above its imposed cliches and attains the status of something like a bleakly beautiful cinematic experience.
