Love Is My Profession

A film with legends Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot that starts off strong, but lags considerably after the first 40 minutes or so. Bardot plays a desperate woman who tries to rob a jeweler with her friend, but things go south and she ends up hammering an old woman with a crowbar. She turns to a lawyer (Gabin) and offers herself to him in exchange for him defending her. He has to knowingly violate the law to do so, so there are some pretty subversive elements to this film. One character says "In hunger, you can do what you like, and afterwards you mustn't feel ashamed," justifying the violent crime. In addition to Bardot hiking up her skirt and later capering about naked after a bath, it openly references adultery, abortion, female sexual desire, and a ménage à trois with the maid. The lawyer's beautiful wife (Edwige Feuillère) is fully aware of what her husband is up to and in one scene drops him off at his lover's hotel. She accepts his indiscretions but with painful reservations, and Feuillère is fantastic in her scenes - I wish there had been more of them. The lawyer's assistant (Madeleine Barbulée) is also an interesting, but underused character.

Where the film goes with the setup is to show that Bardot's character is in some ways just like Gabin's - she likes sex, and wants to have it both ways. She carries on with other men after he sets her up in an apartment as a "kept" woman, and one of them (Franco Interlenghi) gets obsessively attached. The film has her ping-ponging between the two of them as they grow successively more jealous of each other, and unfortunately many of the scenes lack sizzle and are too drawn out. Gabin is too stiff and dour throughout the film, especially when he's with Bardot. He's only 54 here but he seems tired, except when he's explaining to his wife the situation and the two grow animated. Overall the film's editing in the back half should have matched what we see early on, and it probably should have been much shorter than 117 minutes. Towards the end I didn't care what was going to happen to these characters, and found the ratcheted up music tiresome.

Brigitte Bardot et amie invade a jeweler's shop and rob him. While they are doing so, a woman enters and complicates matters, so they knock her out. She may die. The friend is picked up, and Bardot heads to the well known defense lawyer, Jean Gabin. She has no money, so she raises her skirts. Gabin says nothing, gets her off, and then they begin an affair. Gabin is married to Edwige Feuillère. Bardot sleeps around, but says she loves Gabin, even as she has regular horizontal sessions with communist medical student Claude Magnier.

It's a last flare of Pepe Le Moko for Gabin. He's no longer the young criminal. He's older. He's solid. He's married, and Bardot is his last chance for.... if not love, then sexual obsession. Yet director Claude Autant-Lara is no poetic realist. The sexuality of his characters is not cloaked in symbols. It's Bardot walking around naked for a few seconds, it's Bardot and Magnier wearing the same sweater. To show they are linked.... and they must comment on it. There's no need for the audience to dig, it's all laid out for them, and as a result, it's less involving. The performances are great, but without the confidence of the director, there is no magic.

The two hours of this film fly by as your mind is transposed into the heads of both Yvette AND André. Director Autant-Lara's skill is that he allows you to live this story through both of his protagonists' eyes.

Almost instantly you are whisked off to 1959 in this time machine. When you're there you feel uncomfortable, the mood is tense but there's still some humour to keep you going. Unlike some films which give you a flavour of the time they were made in, this one doesn't just give you a sense of 1959, it makes your mind think like it would have in 1959. You are there, you are living in Paris at the end of the 50s, you always have and your attitudes are like neighbours.

André, played infused stoic passion played brilliantly by M. Gabin, like any man with breath in him, cannot of course resist the naive seductive allure of Mlle. Bardot. He behaves utterly stupidly but maybe because it's Brigitte Bardot who's making him do this you don't just understand but can see yourself doing this same thing as well. You find yourself living his life. It must be that empathy engendered by the cleverness of this film which makes you personally feel scared of the consequences of your actions.....even though they're the actions of a dead actor playing a fictitious role written by the guy who wrote Maigret.

Films which drag you into the story are few and far between so treasure this one.

I have no doubt that every cinephile has his or her own favourite adaptation of the prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simenon. This is certainly one of mine. It is directed by Claude Autant-Lara whose last great film this was before his downward curve. Jean Gabin had long since ceased to play the underdog pursued by implacable fate and here gives a faultless performance as a well-heeled, world-weary and somewhat shady lawyer. Brigitte Bardot, in probably her best role, is the tantalising coquette with whom he becomes infatuated. Bardot herself was dismissive of most films in her career, understandably so, although I would be very surprised if this were one of them. The film is beautifully shot by Jacques Nattau with an excellent score by the director's favoured composer Rene Cloerec. Mention must be made of the divine Edwige Feuiliere, one of the greatest actresses of her generation. In one of her best film roles of the 1950's she is tremendous as the wife who turns a blind eye to her husband's peccadilloes. Her character's attitude typifies the thin dividing line between complacency and complicity. As one would expect from this director this is a well-crafted and deeply cynical piece about the frailties of human nature and is one of those films that really gets under the skin.

Almost 35 years before Sharon Stone in BASIC INSTINCT (1992), French actress Brigitte Bardot offered unexpected insights. Bardot fights with the weapons of a woman in a film actually titled EN CAS DE MALHEUR.

Together with a friend, the young Yvette (Brigitte Bardot) commits an amateurish robbery somewhere in Paris, just as the young English Queen Elizabeth is visiting the city on the Seine. An experienced criminal defense attorney (Jean Gabin) actually succeeds in using unfair means to help the devious Yvette secure an acquittal. Of course, the price must be paid. The criminal defense attorney quickly falls for the beautiful thief, which also has significant consequences for the lawyer's loyal wife (Edwige Feuillere) and Yvette's Italian lover (Franco Interlenghi). Even when the lawyer transports Yvette and a maid (Nicole BERGER) to the provinces, the problems don't stop.

At the height of her stardom, Brigitte BARDOT acts on a par with French acting legend Jean GABIN. Such a vibrant drama, full of corruption and sexual addiction, could only have been created in France in the 1950s. In German-speaking countries, audiences had to wait for the films of Rainer Werner FASSBINDER.

The supporting actors in EN CAS DE MALHEUR are also excellent. Edwige Feuillere (1907-1998) draws on all her Parisian stage experience. Nicole BERGER (1934-1967) is known from A GIRL FROM FLANDERS with the later Academy Award winner Maximilian SCHELL. Franco Interlenghi (1931-2015) had already played one of the shoe shiners in Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic of the same name. He also played Telemachus, the son of Odysseus (Kirk Douglas), in The Voyages of Ulysses (1954), based on Homer's epic.