User Reviews

Mesmerized from seeing his 1939 title Cavalcade of Love (also reviewed),I decided that as I neared the end of ICM's French Challenge,that I would view another creation from auteur film maker Raymond Bernard. Spending years at the bottom of my pile of "must watch" DVDs (sorry Raymond!) I got set to finally meet Maya.

View on the film:

Impressively continuing to build on visual themes from the Cavalcade of Love "anthology", co-writer/(with Simon Gantillon) director Raymond Bernard & cinematographer André Thomas make the crew go over to Maya's hellish, isolated island,where Bernard and Thomas's winding tracking shots walk down the dead-end streets where Maya sells her identity and any chance of grasping love or optimism is lost in the Film Noir smog of rotting nightclubs.

Exposing Maya's determination to let no one enter her personal space, Bernard unmasks each clients obsession with her in beautiful in-camera effects that unveil the doll (a recurring motif in this and Cavalcade) that clients see her to be,which shatters with a devastating,shot in first-person,final request for Maya's real name.

Going ashore with a group of sailors in an adaptation of co-writer Simon Gantillon's own play, Bernard and Gantillon take a superb left-field turn, by the traditionally male "Film Noir loner" role going to a woman (with Bernard showing with Simone Simon in Cavalcade that he had an eye for a woman taking the dominant role.)

Following each brief encounter she has with clients,the writers undress each layer of Maya's Noir sorrow in the wilderness with a funeral wreath for a child left in the dark of her work place,and tears running down Maya's face, from seeing her last smoke signals of freedom sailing away.

Scrambling on the island to re-gain an outline to the fading mythical image of his dream love, Marcel Dalio gives a great performance as the crew-member who swims into obsession with Maya and a murderous rage.

Drawing the eyes of all men who walk down the street, the alluring Viviane Romance gives a fantastic performance,which balances a brittleness over attempts made for her to reveal more info, that Romance cracks with a fragility when hiding from view,as she loses her identity to Maya.