In the French Style

It may not sound like much of a recommendation to finish a first viewing of the 1963 Robert Parrish-directed film "In the French Style," re-start the movie with the commentary track running, and hear a trio of film historians (Lem Hobbs Julie Kirgo, and Nick Redman declare that it's "not a good movie." But is that all there is to it?

Their critics assessment can't be faulted. The film is the result of screenwriter Irwin Shaw trying to fuse two of his own short stories together into a single script. The result is disjointed: In the first half of the movie, 19-year-old Christina James (Jean Seberg) is romanced by a dashing Frenchman named Guy (Philippe Fourquet). He's rude in all the right ways: Judgmental, imperious, opinionated, tetchy -- at times insufferable, and yet the two take to each other right away. As the "inevitable" (his word) moment approaches that they will make love, however, both characters start to lose their certainty and their confidence. The outcome is strange, but rather sweet.

Had this been the single story of the film, it could have been made to make more sense. But there's still another forty-five minutes to go; Christina lingers in Paris for far longer than her original planned year. Three years later, she's the toast of the town, having established herself as a (very) minor painter and sometime model, and gotten to know the denizen's of the city's arts scene. Among her many boyfriends, two stand out, both British: Bill (Jack Hedley), who cannot confine himself to one woman, and Walter (Stanley Baker), a newspaper reporter incapable by profession and temperament of lingering too long in one place.

When Christina and Guy encounter each other in passing, there's no ill will -- but neither is there any real sense of resolution or feel for how Christina has gone from shy and virginal to jaded. Has this been a liberation? Has it cost her something? You hope for an answer when her father flies in from Chicago to check up on her (and take a critical look at her work), but it's a no go. Daddy is only in for the weekend, and for the sole purpose of planting the notion in Christina's head that it would be more prudent to return to the States, marry well, and settle into stable domesticity. We're far from the full-on girl power of "Sex and the City," and you wonder why that is. Surely it's not simply due to the year of the film's provenance; the sixties were a time rich in challenges to hierarchy, authority structures, and even gender conceits. When Walter calls Christina a "gentleman" and Bill refers to her as a "pal," you briefly get a sense of men admiring a woman who doesn't need to burn her bra to claim her own agency. The commentary track offers the insight that this movie seems like it's "being made by people who are struggling to make an art film," but the art here is as half-hearted and lacking in vision as one of Christine's own paintings.

In her booklet essay, Kirgo herself decries how the character seems built up for one arc, but suddenly sent spinning off along another trajectory. What has all this been about? Taken at face value, it's an inconsistent and flawed portrait of a young woman's personal development -- she ends up the "sadder but wiser girl" of the old song (albeit not really that sad; no, it's the men who are left desolate in her wake).

Luckily, a movie can be more than the sum of its narrative beats. Michel Kelber's cinematography is delicious (and treated as such on this lovely hi-def transfer) and Seberg may seem as though she is playing two different characters, but she plays both of them so appealingly you really don't mind. This is a wonderful movie just to look at -- or, in the purest sense of the word, to watch. Just don't expect it to guide you to any great (or even trivial) realizations.

Aside from the commentary track and Kirgo's liner notes, the extras for this release also include an isolated score track and the original theatrical trailer.

"In the French Style"
Blu-ray
$29.95
http://www1.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm/ID/31178/IN-THE-FRENCH-STYLE-1963