"Marriage a la mode " ,in the wake of the events of May 68 ,means cohabitation ;the marriage behing now a bourgeois institution which is to be dismissed ....
This movie bears all the appropriate scars of the time, all the available clichés about the after-68 zeitgeist ;a girl,stifling in her provinces,heads off for Paris ,leaving her journalist/partner behind ,but with her other boyfriend with whom she exchanges fortune cookie philosophies about the mean bourgeois way of life .
Of course,when we arrive in Paris ,the first picture we see in the Place saint Michel in the latin quarter.Then the screenplay (based on a book by the director)becomes loose ,desultory ,patchy , aping the worst aspects of the Nouvelle Vaguelette ,a decade before .
The actors playing is amateurish :Yves Beneyton was a specialist of this kind of flick dealing with cult of youth ,fake rebellion (see also "les jeunes loups" by Marcel Carné who disowned this bomb of his);Catherine Jourdan ,who resembled Mia Farrow ,enjoyed a short-lived glory in the erotic "l'Eden Et Après " by nouveau roman writer/director Alain Robbe -Grillet and fell into oblivion afterward-.Add a ludicrous lesbian character , the heroine meets in front of Fauchon grocery ,one of the most expensive places in Paris :anti-bourgeois indeed!
In its last third, the story becomes as far-fetched as never:whilst the heroine becomes a photographer in a vacation village in North Africa (we know it because there are camels),her boyfriend is hospitalized because he has pleurisy :there , the head doctor does not seem to care a little bit for his bedridden patients.
Why on earth did Geraldine Chaplin have to get involved in that business?
