I've been trying hard to appreciate this genre of French film. In all honesty, it's hard. It would be easy to write it off as humorless, pretentious nonsense—lines like "I felt with my heart, not with my hands" might have gotten Malle somewhere in at lame party, but they aren't the sort of thing one ever wants to hear in a theater.
The best I can do is interpret the film politically. The main character is intellectual France and his friends are the rich old guard. Intellectual France went on a bender and wasted its youth; in this it was condescended to by a corrupt and smug class of prigs and losers; now intellectual France has lost the will to live, despite its American-financed cure. This seems to suggest the Vichy past as the bender, America as the unwanted wife, and the perpetuation of corruption into the postwar period as the old guard under De Gaulle. It's not necessary to take the film's Existentialism at face value: French intellectuals should feel horrible after collaborating with Nazi occupiers. This isn't some metaphysical conundrum.
Read this way, the film foretells the death of French culture. There's something to this. The Citroën DS was a high point unless you are really into fast trains and breeder reactors and molecular biology, things that shouldn't be overlooked as great French postwar achievements. But with regard to what most people understand as culture, which means the humanities, France went into a hopeless and irreversible slump in the 60s, blow-hards like Goddard and BHL notwithstanding. Ronet is a charismatic actor, but he's got nothing on Depardieu, the half-educated gang-rapist most French found easier to live with than this postwar generation of spoiled and humorless weaklings.
The best I can do is interpret the film politically. The main character is intellectual France and his friends are the rich old guard. Intellectual France went on a bender and wasted its youth; in this it was condescended to by a corrupt and smug class of prigs and losers; now intellectual France has lost the will to live, despite its American-financed cure. This seems to suggest the Vichy past as the bender, America as the unwanted wife, and the perpetuation of corruption into the postwar period as the old guard under De Gaulle. It's not necessary to take the film's Existentialism at face value: French intellectuals should feel horrible after collaborating with Nazi occupiers. This isn't some metaphysical conundrum.
Read this way, the film foretells the death of French culture. There's something to this. The Citroën DS was a high point unless you are really into fast trains and breeder reactors and molecular biology, things that shouldn't be overlooked as great French postwar achievements. But with regard to what most people understand as culture, which means the humanities, France went into a hopeless and irreversible slump in the 60s, blow-hards like Goddard and BHL notwithstanding. Ronet is a charismatic actor, but he's got nothing on Depardieu, the half-educated gang-rapist most French found easier to live with than this postwar generation of spoiled and humorless weaklings.