The random home video observations of author and critic TIM LUCAS.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Revisiting Paul and Michelle

Because I am acquainting myself with the work of the late French actress Anicée Alvina in preparation to record an audio commentary for the BFI's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Alain Robbe-Grillet's SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE, tonight I watched her two best-known American releases, FRIENDS (1971) and PAUL & MICHELLE (1974), both directed by Lewis Gilbert.
The first, best remembered due to its Elton John score, is about a couple of mature-before-their-time 15 year olds who run away from their unhappy homes, cohabitate, and end up having a child together. The sequel (made the same year as the Robbe-Grillet film, which is hard to believe - and the same year I got married, which is still harder to wrap my brain around) picks up their story three years further on, heaping some of life's difficulties on the reunited, but still-young couple. I last saw these movies when I was 17 and single, yet already a working critic; at the time, they seemed simplistic, soapy and wishy-washy to me, but seeing them again took me back with remarkable clarity to what it felt like to be a married teenager with a small apartment and a working wife. This detail alone made them feel unexpectedly moving at times.
Anicée and her co-star Sean Bury (one of the kids in Lindsay Anderson's IF... and Joseph Cotten's son in THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES) meet the challenge of their bilingual roles capably and it seemed to me that it could be argued that these movies -- to be frank, mostly forgotten now -- were the more innocent prototypes of Richard Linklater's BEFORE movies. This series might have continued, but the sequel flopped at the box office. Sean Bury has been retired from acting for some time, and Anicée died in 2006 at age 53, so we can only wonder if this couple ever met again or let each other go. To my surprise, the act of watching the two films again back-to-back made me feel an emotional investment in this young family's future so, regardless of the films' respective weaknesses, I can't exactly write them off as failures.
Neither film is presently available on DVD. FRIENDS is available via Amazon Instant; to see PAUL AND MICHELLE, you'll need to be more resourceful. 

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