Manon 70 (Jean Aurel, 1968)

Across such an intervening distance, it’s hard to know how much Jean Aurel’s Manon 70 is channeling the specific morality of its era, versus merely engaging in pretty, titillating fantasies. Journalist Des Grieux (Sami Frey) sees Manon (Catherine Deneuve) in a Japanese airport, and his first transgression follows almost immediately – blowing expense account money on upgrading to first class to boost his chances with her. The gamble works, but the die is already cast – not too much later (whether in narrative or in screen time) he’s out of a job, and tolerating behaviour from Manon of the kind for which he earlier said he’d kill her. But then, everybody’s doing it – Manon’s brother (Jean-Claude Brialy) appears to live primarily on the earnings of pimping her out, even getting a nightclub out of it when an American millionaire Ravaggi (Robert Webber) enters the scene (Ravaggi is the one character who seems turned on primarily by tuning into his own rapaciousness, which may be intended as a shot at the under-sensualized US) . The film crams a lot into its 100 minutes, too much to impress as a serious sociological and psychological investigation, especially when everyone and everywhere looks so ravishing (except for Stockholm which is made to look like the back end of Siberia). Aurel takes Deneuve mostly at face value, which indeed is worth a lot, until one compares to her greatest  works of this era. It’s hard not to think of the film in relation to her recent cautionary comments on the “Me too” movement – it exemplifies a notion of messy, self-gratifying act-now-work-out-the-details-later hedonism. Perhaps that’s not really much of a view of human interaction, but as the film is at least notionally based on an 18^th century work of literature, you might conclude it’s drawing on some weary notion of the long view.