La Maison des Bories (1970)
Directed by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

Film Review

Despite being one of France's most influential critics in the 1950s (and, incidentally, co-founder of the Cahiers du cinéma) Jacques Doniol-Valcroze remained a comparatively minor figure in the French New Wave, achieving nothing like the acclaim and longevity of his contemporaries (who included his close friend François Truffaut).  Doniol-Valcroze began making films in the late 1950s, when the Nouvelle Vague was just beginning to impact on French cinema, and his early work was just as evocative of its time as the films of Rivette, Godard and Truffaut.   L'Eau à la bouche (1960) and Le Coeur battant (1960), his first two features, were well-received by the critics but lacked the crowd-pulling potential of Truffaut and Godard's early films.  As he continued making films in the 1960s, Doniol-Valcroze had a loyal following but he always remained on the periphery of the French New Wave.

La Maison des Bories was one of the last films that Doniol-Valcroze made for the cinema - a hauntingly lyrical portrayal of an impossible romance that, with its sensitivity, warmth and visual poetry, differs markedly from the director's previous work.  Lacking the earthiness and cynicism of Doniol-Valcroze's earlier films, La Maison des Bories feels like the work of an altogether different director, one who had a completely more sympathetic and forgiving view of human frailty.  With its aching beautifully location photography (the setting being Haute-Provence, one of the most picturesque regions of France), the film has a visceral immediacy, managing to be intensely poignant without ever feeling saccharine or contrived.  By overlaying onto his film some of Mozart's most evocative musical compositions (including the andante of the Piano Concerto No. 21, which had previously been used to great effect on the Swedish film Elvira Madigan (1967)), Doniol-Valcroze manages to suggest moods and feelings that no quantity of dialogue could express, about the pleasure, pain and hopeless transience of love.

At the heart of this elegantly crafted fable is a glowingly alluring Marie Dubois, devastatingly convincing as a married woman who is torn between a husband to whom she is visibly ill-suited and the handsome young German (Mathieu Carrière) who is suddenly parachuted into her idyllic world.  It is the old tale of forbidden love, but rendered with such exquisite tact and delicacy that you cannot fail to be moved by it.  The love affair between Isabelle and Carl-Stéphane remains chaste, although their mutual attraction is more than evident.  In the film's most memorable sequence, Doniol-Valcroze cross-cuts repeatedly between the two lovers as they get into their separate beds in adjacent rooms, uniting them only in their imagination.  Although the story has a decidedly moral outcome, the tone of the film is far from moralistic.  What you feel in those closing moments as the summer idyll melts away to nothing is a terrible sense of loss, and we can but mourn for the path that will now never be trod, for the love that can never blossom.

Film Synopsis

Julien Durras is a highly regarded geologist who lives with his younger wife Isabelle and their two children, Laurent and Lise, at a remote country villa in Provence known as the House of the Bories.  Durras is so preoccupied with his research that he has no time for his family, and whilst Isabelle does her best to play the perfect wife, her husband is fast becoming a self-absorbed tyrant.  It is into this strained household that a young German student, Karl-Stéphane, comes, to work as a translator for Darras.  Unlike his employer, the student finds time to play with the children and they come to regard him as a friend, whilst Isabelle also finds herself attracted to him.  With her husband away from home for a few days, Isabelle finally realises that she is falling in love with Karl-Stéphane.  Perturbed by the direction their relationship is heading in, she is both excited and anxious by the prospect that she might be about to embark on an adulterous affair.   Isabelle hesitates and finally decides that she must confide in the sympathetic young man and ask him to leave...