Un soupçon d'amour

Paul Vecchiali is an ambitious demanding director;his "L'Etrangleur" (1970)renewed the "serial killer" genre even before it was trendy again;his" En Haut Des Marches" about collaboration during the Occupation ,flouting chronology, cast Danielle Darrieux as the "what -could -I - do? I did not know"- passive irresponsible woman confronted to a politically correct young lawyer,her goddaughter, "who anyway was not living through those dark days"."La machine" gave the sordid affair of a girlie's murder a treatment diametrically opposite of that of André Cayatte ,based on the power of the medias and of public opinion .And "le café des Jules",his most accessible movie, depicted a homophobic misogynist world in the enclosed space of a café.

At 90+,the director has not lost his ambition, and although remaining unsung ,except by the intellectual critics , makes "un soupçon d'amour" an UFO on the feel good scene of the contemporary French cinema .

The beginning of the movie may be off-putting ,and its rehearsals of Racine's "Andromaque " does not seem to make sense ,although they do as the movie "grows on you" till the unexpected final twist (which for once is thoroughly relevant)

Vecchiali casts one of his favorite actresses ,the luminous Marianne Basler ("Rosa La rose"1986 "le cancre" )who shines in every sense of the term in her part of an actress on the top of her game who knows her time of doubt and fear and gives up the role of Andromaque in her colleague's favor -who's also her husband's lover.

One can wonder why she chooses to be cast as Jeanne Fortier ,"la porteuse de pain" ,an exponential melodrama of the nineteenth century ,in a movie : because this unfortunate victim meets again her son ,after spending time in jail ,unfairly convicted?

One can only conjecture about this son:he's always coughing and one suspects he's terminally-ill ;never a word is said about it although clues are given to the viewer : the strange meeting with the chemist and his mother, the walk through the cemetary where the actress cannot find her family's grave , the old flame of hers who has become a priest, her schoolteacher who should be retired but was asked by the mayor to carry on with her work at school. When the actress who replaces her as Andromaque (and was panned by the critics and disdained by the audience) comes to visit her ,she tells her boy to play with his toys. She seems to hide him from the world ,perhaps because she's ashamed of him. Or because her career (and her husband's , as one sees in the last scene in which they root out the evil) has taken the best of her?

The film is dedicated to Douglas Sirk ,the king of the fifties melodramas .