Appointment in Bray

Delvaux was one of those directors who kept on working in his own creative world, seemingly oblivious to the pressures of the commercial world. He got his start by playing the piano for screenings of silent films in Brussels in 1950, just as the hero does here. Then he did TV documentaries before making his first feature, The Man Who Had his Hair Cut Short. Like Un Soir, Un train that preceded it, Rendez-vous a Bray is very lovely to look at (cinematography by the great Ghislain Cloquet) but it unfolds in a sort of glacial calm that leaves me cold.

Because the tone is so restrained, the acting so diminished in expression, the story never really engages the viewer. Mathieu Carriere was never my idea of a romantic lead (he was thinner than David Bowie), and Anna Karina, trying to start her career again after the breakup with Godard, just does the minimum, with no help from Delvaux. There are hints of a Jules et Jim type of triangle, with pixyish Bulle Ogier as the girl who would interrupt the passionate friendship of Carriere and van Hool, but it isn't fully developed. Delvaux is just too fixated on those beautiful interiors, and nothing, not even the carnage of the war--it's 1917--can get him out of them.