It gives me a small pleasure to recall that the French New Wave, one of the most important artistic movements in world cinema, began in a critical journal years before any of its alums would film their first features. Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol launched their careers as critics for Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine launched in 1951. In its renegade pages, they rejected the conformist standards of postwar French cinema and championed classic American directors whose artistry was largely ignored by the intelligentsia in their own country. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for their own auteurist visions behind the camera, which would flourish by the late 1950s.
While the names above have been canonized in film history, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze has been largely forgotten, though he was instrumental in the movement’s genesis. He cofounded Cahiers du Cinema with fellow-critics Andre Bazin and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca; allowed Truffaut to shoot his debut short, Une Visite, in Doniol-Valcroze’s apartment; and acted in New Wave films.
He tried his hand at directing, too, with his first feature, 1960’s A Game for Six Lovers, landing in cinemas in between Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless. The timing, in retrospect, seems ideal for Doniol-Valcroze to have ridden the Wave toward a successful career, though in a 1998 book on the Nouvelle Vague, critic Jean Douchet asserts that A Game for Six Lovers had already “arrived too late” and was “not strong enough to surprise.”
We finally have a change to judge Doniol-Valcroze’s work thanks to the dedicated celluloid excavators at Icarus Films, which released A Game for Six Lovers last month ($26.49 Blu-ray). It’s set in the Chateau d’Aubiry, an imposing, art-filled mansion in the south of France, where the six lovers in questions have convened for the reading of a will. The family’s matriarch has died, and her daughter, the stylish Parisian Milena (Françoise Brion), is set to meet her estranged cousins, Jean-Paul and Fifine, for the first time since they were children, all of whom stand to gain from the family inheritance.
While Fifine (Alexandra Stewart) arrives to the estate in all honesty, the man posing as Jean-Paul is actually Fifine’s boyfriend Robert (Jacques Riberolles). The real Jean-Paul won’t arrive for another two days — plenty of time for Robert, who maintains an open relationship with Fifine, to pursue a tryst with Milena.
The other two of Doniol-Valcroze’s six lovers emerge from the staffing quarters: the sex-obsessed family butler Cesar (Michel Galabru), and a newly hired chambermaid, played with spunk and slyness by Bernadette Lafont, who initially rejects Cesar’s lewd overtures.
Doniol-Valcroze is a more than competent filmmaker, embracing movement in his frames, from copious zooms, pans and crane shots to a dizzying sequence of sexual conquest in which the camera itself seems drunk on pheromones. Yet it’s easy to see why A Game for Six Lovers failed to secure the international reputation of his maverick compatriots from Cahiers. It’s a film that aspires to be a part of the New Wave but feels equally tethered to the past. The randy butler, the coquettish chambermaid, the double-dealing lothario, the ennui-laced city girl — these were shopworn archetypes even by the mid-1950s. from the mistaken identity plot to characters slipping in and out of rooms to avoid detection, much of the film plays as straight-up farce, a genre that Godard was already working to deconstruct in titles such as A Woman is a Woman.
But the ludic sensibilities inherent in Robert’s ruse are very much in line with what the Nouvelle Vague critics admired so much in Alfred Hitchcock’s subversive work, even if Doniol-Valcroze is far less the sadist than Hitch. Or, for that matter, Luis Buñuel, a far more savage critic of the indolent upper-class. A Game for Six Lovers could have been another Exterminating Angel, a corrosive satire on elite decadence. But its director is too empathetic toward his subjects, preferring a scalpel to a rapier.
The film is at its best in its final third, set in the harsh light of Monday morning, when the sexual roulette of the weekend yields to uncomfortable truths, and Doniol-Valcroze’s roving camera collapses from exhaustion. Doniol-Valcroze may have been a revolutionary in his criticism, but his modest foray into filmmaking suggests a sentimentalist at heart, one torn between the old world of French cinema and the trails blazing around him.
Icarus’ Blu-ray release has generously included a 15-minute short film from 1965, The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora, directed by a similarly obscure New Wave figure, Jeanne Barbillon, and it feels like a genuine revelation — the missing feminist link between Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.
Bernadette Lafont, who portrayed the chambermaid in A Game for Six Lovers, plays the bored and neglected girlfriend of a soldier, who wiles away her life in rural France by communing with, and gradually transforming into, the local plant life. The entire film consists of her voice-over narration as she self-actualizes, the writing concise and vivid: “My thoughts woke up. They jumped like little frogs.” Each frame — shot by Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer of peak Godard works — is a stylized tableaux that one imagines could have fired the imagination of a young Wes Anderson. It’s uncommon to recommend purchasing a disc mainly for its supplementary short, but The Botanical Avatar is well worth a place in a world cinephile’s collection.