The only person more entranced by the spontaneous beauty of Jeanne Moreau's titular EVA than a smitten Stanley Baker is director Joseph Losey, who created a Moreau Valentine set in Venice on the outskirts of the Cannes Film Festival as Baker's newly-famous, working-class writer Tyvian Jones can't get enough from the very minute he catches her crashing his rented villa...
He's a boisterous, womanizing fluke of an author and she's a visually artistic muse, captured by Losey's camera-creative style (following Baker perpetually following Moreau) inspired by the French New Wave yet also coinciding with his own same-year's British thriller THESE ARE THE DAMNED...
Both are eerie, offbeat and splattered with Beatnik-jazz, only EVA has no real plot except for the manly writer falling deeper and deeper in love, progressively losing an artistic soul that's manufactured to begin with...
Meanwhile Mouraeau, compared to Baker's younger, softer, somewhat prettier yet blindly naive Virna Lisi as Francesca, ignites a kind of third-act love triangle, which is as mainstream as the otherwise arthouse story gets...
Ultimately the only way both EVA the character and movie falters is she never rises above the director's breezy platform, leaving Baker (and Lisi) a predictably melodramatic finale by comparison...
But if the entire point, purpose and theme is that a beautiful woman can be downright intoxicating, this is a gracefully maneuvered, two-hour hangover... without the headache.
He's a boisterous, womanizing fluke of an author and she's a visually artistic muse, captured by Losey's camera-creative style (following Baker perpetually following Moreau) inspired by the French New Wave yet also coinciding with his own same-year's British thriller THESE ARE THE DAMNED...
Both are eerie, offbeat and splattered with Beatnik-jazz, only EVA has no real plot except for the manly writer falling deeper and deeper in love, progressively losing an artistic soul that's manufactured to begin with...
Meanwhile Mouraeau, compared to Baker's younger, softer, somewhat prettier yet blindly naive Virna Lisi as Francesca, ignites a kind of third-act love triangle, which is as mainstream as the otherwise arthouse story gets...
Ultimately the only way both EVA the character and movie falters is she never rises above the director's breezy platform, leaving Baker (and Lisi) a predictably melodramatic finale by comparison...
But if the entire point, purpose and theme is that a beautiful woman can be downright intoxicating, this is a gracefully maneuvered, two-hour hangover... without the headache.