Just when you thought French cinema couldn't possibly get any weirder here we are with
Charlotte Rampling throwing in her all in a light-hearted sex romp with a chimpanzee.
It sounds like the premise for a bad Monty Python sketch but somehow
the acclaimed Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima takes it and uses
it as the basis for quite a classy satire on bourgeois life. After all, why
shouldn't a ravishingly beautiful woman in her early forties fall head
over heels in love with a hairy primate - isn't this just the kind of thing that
happens in virtually every other French movie?
If the film were made today, Max would no doubt be a superbly
convincing digital special effect. Alas, back in the mid-1980s
such technology was a long way off and so we have to suspend
disbelief and try not to laugh when a female dancer in a monkey suit (Ailsa Berk)
appears on the screen and does a not entirely convincing impersonation
of a chimpanzee.
Good taste and the strong likelihood of heavyhanded censorship prevent anything
involving explicit inter-species coupling from being shown on screen,
so the film is less a pervy shocker and more a mildly provocative
comedy of manners along the lines of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967),
a film which it sometimes seems to be a vague parody of.
Charlotte Rampling is probably the only actress on the planet who
could convince us that her soulmate is a chimp, and far from being
perverse, there's something quaintly endearing about her simian
love affair. Why shouldn't a woman's best friend be a pint-size ape?
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Film Synopsis
Suspecting that his wife, Margaret, is having a secret love affair, Peter Jones, a British
ambassador in Paris, engages a private detective to investigate. The truth is more
than he can bear: for the past year, his wife has been having an affair with a circus
chimpanzee. Not sure how to deal with the situation, Peter persuades Margaret to
let the chimp stay with them in their chic Parisian apartment...
It was American film noir and pulp fiction that kick-started the craze for thrillers in 1950s France and made it one of the most popular and enduring genres.