Short stories can be an excellent starting point for movies because usually they are lean and narrative driven, a screenwriter needing basically to fill out the characters and add a subplot. But short stories have one weakness. They require a pay-off, a twist, something the reader doesn’t see coming. And short of a twist of the caliber of Jagged Edge (1985) or The Sixth Sense (1999), these don’t usually come off, the audience feeling duped.
This one falls down due to a twist. Two actually, because it comprises a pair of initially unconnected short stories, A Year to Learn the Language and In the French Style. Which is a shame because the movie itself with its Parisian setting is in general charming and conveys the development of young American Christine (Jean Seberg) as she moves from innocent wannabe artist to promiscuous model while worrying she is throwing her life away on transient pleasures.
Writer Irwin Shaw (Two Weeks in Another Town, 1962), who doubles as producer, has used Christine as the link between two of this best-known short stories. So it’s – to dip into soccer parlance – a film of two halves and I’ll let you know right away co-star Stanley Baker (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965) is consigned to the second part, when he meets an older and perhaps more rueful Christine.
So, young, not exactly starving (an allowance from her father funds her lifestyle), artist meets a young Frenchman Guy (Phillipe Forquet) determined to be the antithesis of the standard Frenchman. He doesn’t drink because alcohol is ruining his country. He won’t kiss her in public because not all Frenchman are insanely romantic. He’s severely lacking it has to be said in the romantic gene. Seduction is abrupt. He’s got the key to a friend’s apartment. Let’s go. Is as much subtlety as he can summon up.
So no sex this time and she decides she’ll be the one doing the asking, which upsets his notion of the biddable girlfriend. Anyway, they end up touring Paris on his scooter looking for a suitable no-questions-asked hotel. Surprisingly, the city, according to Guy, isn’t full of them.
And end up in a freezing hotel room. He can’t open the champagne bottle. He insists she undress last, as apparently that’s the done thing. And then he springs his surprise. He’s not only a virgin, he’s not the 21-year-old he told her he was, but still at school and just 16.
If this had been done The Graduate-style, with his awkwardness to the fore, or if she had just been as clumsy, it would probably have worked. There would have been nothing illegal in their coupling, or cringe-worthy (she’s 19 after all), but it just makes her out to be an idiot, fooled because she effectively fell for the first handsome Frenchman to come her way. It just drops a bomb of the wrong kind halfway through the movie.
Cut to four years later and she’s much more the lady-about-town, independent or of questionable morals depending on your point of view, self-sufficient or relying on male companionship to see her through depending on your point of view. Having been dumped by Bill (Jack Hedley), she hooks up with itinerant flamboyant journalist Walter (Stanley Baker) but while he’s off on some important story she’s made hay with more sober American Dr John Haislip (James Leo Herlihy, yes that one, author of Midnight Cowboy) and chooses security over culture and fun.
The problem with this section is that the short story was originally written from Walter’s point of view, as he comes to realize that long-term commitment is not compatible with globe-trotting.
All told, a pretty odd concoction. That it works at all is largely due to Jean Seberg (Breathless, 1960). I’m not totally convinced by her transition. You get the impression that had she met a more worldly Frenchman in the first half she would have quickly shaken him off for another lover. As it is, her rootlessness is meant to be the result of being disappointed by a schoolboy lover. Hmmm!
Although there’s over-reliance on Paris atmosphere – jazz club, Arc de Triomphe, restaurants where waiters transport flambe dishes halfway across a room, a “happening” where the art crowd lets it all hang out – and we rely on other characters telling us about Christine’s personal situation, it remains an interesting view of the French capital from the point-of-view of an American ex-pat, who, less successfully than Hemingway perhaps, offers a different perspective on the city. Robert Parrish (Duffy, 1968) directed.
Worth it, though, to see Seberg transformed.
The Magnificent 60s 
Do the two stories correspond to two different halfs of the film? Seems like an odd construction…
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It is a film of two halves. The second half was more interesting than the first. The first suffered from a short strory pay-off.
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