L'amour c'est gai, l'amour c'est triste

The populist cinema of the thirties/forties gets a Neo New Wave treatment!

The characters could come from "Hotel Du Nord": there's a sad tailor (Claude Melki),less-than -handsome ,and so shy he is not able to declare his love to a pretty girl (Chantal Goya ,before she became a pop singer for kiddies Under 7);a Hooker (Bernadette Lafont;who else?) who hides her immoral trade ,pretending she is a fortune-teller :nobody's fooled and all her clients are not interested in their future ;and her pimp ,an elegant fop à la Louis Jouvet (Jean-Pierre Marielle).Except for one sequence in a railway station,all the action takes place in the tailor's seedy apartment .

IMHO,it is not a very exciting work:Claude Melki is arguably the stand-out but Remo Forlani is not Henri Jeanson ,as far the dialog is concerned ,and his lines fall flat ;Bernadette Lafont,by far the best of the two actresses ,seems to wait for something to happen concerning her character;Marielle is not much more than a walk-on;Chantal Goya ,whose part was the most interesting, is a drippy starlet ,and she plays like she sings -she had started a career as a pop singer for teenagers while working with Godard ("Masculin-Feminin" in which her immortal " Si Tu Gagnes Au Flipper" is heard).

I almost fell asleep halfway through ,but there are interesting thespians in the supporting cast :the legendary Dalio,and Rufus ,too rare on the screens .

It is as if Forlani,towards the end of his screenplay ,suddenly appreciated how frivolous it all was and desperately attempted to get a little humor into his story:

-The client ,with whom Goya refused to "work" ,insulting the unfortunate tailor mistaken for her pimp :"you ought to be ashamed of your job!"

-Then the best lines in the whole movie: "Arlette is busy picking grapes. -Harvesting grapes? In April ? In Brittany?

Jean-Daniel Pollet was an obscure director of the generation of Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol who didn't achieve the acclaim of the better known men. I'd seen only his sketch for the film Paris vu par..., and it wasn't very good. Now TFO has shown this feature on its nightly film series, and I got a chance to assess the man's work. It isn't good. Claude Melki made a half-dozen films with Pollet, they seem to have worked very well together. Melki's minimalist style of acting goes with Pollet's minimalist direction to put us to sleep during the first hour. Then--miracle!--Dalio bursts into the shabby apartment and brings life to the story. Chantal Goya's delight is palpable: at last we're going to have fun. And so are we, the spectators. Jean-Pierre Marielle made so many good comedies during his career, and this isn't one of them. He's a boring thug here. Bernadette Lafont played slutty so very well--for Truffaut in Une belle fille comme moi, for instance--that she could do it in her sleep; maybe she's a bit comatose here. I give 5/10.