L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

It’s only in the closing moments of Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou that we learn the rehearsal process we’ve observed for much of the preceding four hours was limited to three weeks and that an opening night is looming; for much of the film we might have believed the process to be effectively infinite and self-justifying, the idea of a finished performance solely notional. In this regard, the play mirrors the challenging length and rhythms of Rivette’s film, and of his cinema as a whole – he would go from this to the twelve-hour Out One (for which L’amour fou often in itself resembles something of a rehearsal). It’s among his more pessimistic and closed films though, with a strong, entropic feel: the viewer might take from it the sense that such an artistic exploration is inherently capable of reaching an end, and that the attempt may only cause stagnation and collapse. As the film starts, the married couple Sebastien and Claire are respectively director and star of the play (Racine’s Andromaque) – she rapidly flees the production, ostensibly unable to tolerate the film cameras that he’s allowing to film everything. He recasts the role with an old girlfriend, while Claire continues to hover around the edges of the production: as his creative process breaks down, she experiments with finding her own mode of expression, some of this entailing the film’s most comic notions (as when she becomes obsessed with bringing home a particular breed of dog). Rivette deliberately confounds any clear reading of their relationship – a scene of apparent rupture might be followed by one of togetherness; ultimately they withdraw entirely from the world for several days, wrecking the apartment and seeming on the verge of becoming feral, but this too suddenly comes to an end. Claire ultimately breaks out, commenting that she’s “woken up”; Sebastien, it seems, can be allowed no such escape, art being ultimately less malleable than life. Rivette’s body of work would evolve toward easier pleasures and more composed expression: L’amour fou almost carries the sense of incubation, of one of cinema’s greatest artists ruminating and pondering his own future direction and its attendant limits.

Flying Deuces (A. Edward Sutherland, 1939)

In most respects, Flying Deuces is run-of-the-mill Laurel and Hardy – rickety in much of its plotting and execution, and not particularly inspired in most of its set-pieces. It warrants some serious reflection as a contribution to their oeuvre and mythology though, for its (I would say) quite unnerving preoccupation with death, and worse, suicide. It’s not so much that Ollie decides to kill himself after being rejected by the girl he loves, but that he assumes Stan will come with him, cold-bloodedly painting him a picture of the derided, unviable existence he’ll lead, absent Ollie’s oversight and guidance. The argument works too, until external intervention sends them on another path - into the French foreign legion, where they’re again rapidly faced with a mortal threat, sentenced to death for trying to desert. But then, at the end, Ollie actually does die, leaving Stan alone (and looking as happy as he does through the whole film) until a bizarre reincarnation/transmigration intervenes. Perhaps there’s something inherently metaphysical in the discontinuous L&H universe – for example in how they go from having wives and apparent social respectability in Sons of the Desert to having no apparent life experience at all in other movies, the only fixed point being each other – but Flying Deuces makes that weirdly explicit. But in case this makes the movie sound like an anticipation of Ingmar Bergman, there’s the offsetting moment where even in the midst of life-threatening mayhem as they run from pursuing soldiers, they’re captivated by a bunch of musicians and stop for Ollie to sing Shine on Harvest Moon while Stan performs a lovely little dance. Their work wouldn’t be so beguiling if not for the recurring optimism, for the regular surrender to something hopeful and elevating, even as their dimension-spanning mutual dependence provides an existential barrier to such opportunities being more than fleeting.

Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film Un flic may not necessarily seem to add much to his filmography: it’s another terse, tight-lipped crime thriller, shot through with isolation and alienation. The film’s primary (and tertiary) interest may lie though in just how far it takes those attributes, seeming to push with chilling certainty toward a kind of vanishing point where people might hardly register at all, except as disillusioned, hollowed-out markers, playing out a pointless destiny. The film features one of the most passionless sexual triangles in memory: Simone (Catherine Deneuve) sleeps with both the policeman Coleman (Alain Delon) and a villainous club owner Simon (Richard Crenna), apparently with the knowledge of both, but Melville makes such limited use of Deneuve that her presence almost seems to pose some kind of puzzle. The film contains several counterpointing portraits of quiet anguish – one of Simon’s partners in crime who’s driven by unemployment, watched over by his anxious wife; a transgender informant who seems to stare at Coleman with unexpressed longing – but they mainly only serve to underline the detachment of the principals. The major wordless set-piece – the daring theft of a consignment of drugs from a moving train – is largely self-contained, with only minimal narrative connection to what comes before or afterwards; when resolution comes, it’s without even a moment of exultation, and the concept of closure hardly comes to mind, partly because of what still hangs (or at least should hang) over Coleman and Simone (he shot too soon and killed an unarmed man; she carried out cold-blooded murder) and otherwise because it’s never clear what exactly was open. Melville’s choice of exteriors – from the most isolated bank to be found anywhere outside a Western; to the modernist exterior of the police headquarters – supports the sense of abstraction; he drains the interior of Simon’s club of any sense of pleasure or eroticism. One certainly wouldn’t recommend the film as the place to begin with Melville; but it’s a disquietingly apt place to end.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

From one perspective, the use of Billie Holliday’s “It’s the Same Old Story” over the closing credits of Bad Timing might seem like a rather tritely ironic take on the disturbing narrative we’ve just witnessed, an implication that every dreamy love story is just one twist away from comparable sickness. But the song’s greater resonance is in the invocation of stasis and repetition, of events being drawn toward a singularity or vanishing point. At one point, Theresa Russell’s Milena expresses a wish that Art Garfunkel’s Linden would understand her less and love her more, or put another way, join her in following the emotional and sensual demands of the moment over those of a structured narrative (Linden is a research psychoanalyst who we pointedly see at work in Vienna’s Sigmund Freud museum). The film works toward a particularly nasty granting of her wish, circling around a moment where Linden indeed submits to the demands of a key moment, but at the cost of completely objectifying and dehumanizing her, even of bringing her to the brink of death. The third main character, Harvey Keitel’s detective, doesn’t so much investigate the event as will himself into being a displaced participant in it, seemingly seeing in Linden’s transgression some kind of terrible, humbling artistry (that of the director behind it?). Several scenes take place on the border between Austria and (as it was then) Czechoslovakia, on the border between freedoms and ideologies, and Linden periodically does profiling work for the US army, an underdeveloped strand that nevertheless feeds a sense of paranoid destabilization. For all the fragmented evasiveness of the film’s structure, Roeg’s visuals are direct and intimidating and accusatory: it isn’t a particularly “pleasant” watch by conventional measures, its prevailing tone drawing heavily on Garfunkel’s snotty, self-righteous Linden, but that’s just another measure of Roeg’s aesthetic fearlessness during his peak period.

Les uns et les autres (Claude Lelouch, 1981)

Claude Lelouch starts his epic Les uns et les autres by citing Willa Cather: “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” This initially plays as an acknowledgment of the universal calamity of war: the film sets up scenarios in France, Germany, Russia and the US, then plunges them into immediate upheaval, dispatching some people whom we might have expected to be major characters so rapidly and cleanly that the impact is almost subliminal. As it travels into the present day, the film’s narrative keeps gathering speed, often carrying the sense of a teetering helicopter: transitions from meetings to relationships to break-ups take mere seconds; fates are sealed in a couple of lines. Intentionally or not (it’s hard to tell), Cather’s maxim comes to seem not so much like an assertion of shared experience but as one of existential meaninglessness and stasis, in which nothing really evolves across generations (underlined by casting several actors as both mothers/fathers and their daughters/sons, and minimizing the use of aging make-up) or borders or transitions, and in which the national and social distinctions of the earlier sequences fuzzily converge. The redemption, it seems, lies in music: the movie overflows with performance – spanning dance and orchestral and pop videos and jazz bands, played to large crowds and empty halls, before cameras and in rehearsal rooms – culminating in a final extended showpiece that brings together most or all (it’s hard to keep track) of the surviving characters either as performers or as spectators (the notion of sublimation into spectacle is one of several respects in which the film brings Scorsese’s New York New York to mind, although the comparison only underlines the recurring passionless of Lelouch’s creation). The film has no shortage of diversions then, and the ambition is almost hypnotic, but the further it pushes toward greatness, the smaller and emptier it ultimately feels.

A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967)

Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong certainly encapsulates the recurring quandary of engaging with an auteur’s late work, persistently raising the question of how to distinguish a knowingly backward-looking, honed-down classicism from mere outdatedness, artistic fatigue and irrelevance. In this case the evidence for the latter position is fairly extensive: the film contains long stretches that appear intended to function as screwball comedy (Marlon Brando’s Ogden is hiding a stowaway, Sophia Loren’s Natascha, in his cruise ship cabin, triggering endless outbursts of running and flapping around in response to knocks on the door) but in practice just die on the screen, the victim of flat staging and pacing and unengaged acting; a romance develops between Ogden and Natascha, but if this wasn’t spelled out in the dialogue, we likely wouldn’t be able to tell from anything that’s visible on the screen (the lack of chemistry between the stars is overwhelming). It’s probably most interesting in the brief bits of business that one can imagine a younger Chaplin reserving for himself: an extended sequence in which Ogden’s butler Hudson (Patrick Cargill) prepares for bed while dizzy from Natascha’s presence in the same room; the diversionary sleight of hand exercised on another passenger who’s on the prowl for Natascha. There’s something stubbornly admirable too about the extent of the film’s artificiality: the external shots are so few and for the most part so indifferently integrated that one wishes Chaplin had dispensed with them altogether. In the end, the film feels stubborn to the point of solipsism, treating the Hudson character with significant callousness, dumping the key emotional and financial negotiation between Ogden and his wife (Tippi Hedren) in mid-stream, and ending on a most stiffly and formally conceived romantic reunion (“Shut up and deal,” it isn’t). The occasional evocation of “world peace” and political unease is surely counterproductive in reminding us that the film is indeed set on this specific planet in the 1960’s, rather than in the sealed-off, timeless studio world for which it appears to pine.

L'homme en colere (Claude Pinoteau, 1979)

The quality of Claude Pinoteau’s L’homme en colere might be summed up by the slapdash misspelling of several lead actors’ names in the opening credits, and by the presumably inadvertent omission of Lisa Pelikan’s name altogether from the end-roll. This merely sums up a pervasive quality of vagueness and displacement, typical of the era’s co-productions, and extended here in consistently perplexing, and thus rather fascinating manner. Lino Ventura plays Romain Dupre, a retired pilot summoned from France to Montreal by the reported death of his estranged son; the corpse turns out to be that of another man, setting off Dupre in search of the truth. Much of the interest merely comes from seeing Ventura (inherently searching and substantial, but less compelling and engaged here than in his previous year’s visit to Britain in Jack Gold’s Medusa Touch) in particularly time- and place-stamped settings: at a Montreal disco; in a restaurant where the menu is splattered with gaudy pictures of horrible-looking food; at a Canadiens’ hockey game; standing in front of a marquee for Burt Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans; and most spectacularly of all, playing scenes (albeit in different tongues) with a dubbed Angie Dickinson, faintly echoing her Hawksian peak as a woman with little distinct direction or agenda, who almost instanteously hitches her fortunes to his. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, working its way to a distinctly under-powered new beginning between father and son (the film’s deployment of flashbacks to evoke their past conflicts is among its least artful points, which is indeed saying something). The movie conforms to all the underwhelming preconceptions about the dominant Canadian cinema of the time, exhibiting little or no artistic personality, relying on extremely cursory plotting and staging, and seeming to be besotted with the availability of international “names” (Donald Pleasence also turns up for two brief, meaningless scenes). As noted, I managed to extract a few compensations from it; more discerning viewers may not even come away with that much.

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief is generally classified, not too inappropriately, as a relatively light-hearted diversion between weightier efforts: although the plot is organized around the mystery of the identity of the thief to be caught, any suspense is entirely notional. The film is heavy with established signifiers of “sophistication” – gorgeous French Riviera settings (it duly won an Oscar for its cinematography, although of all Hitchcock’s films, it often comes closest simply to assembling pretty pictures) with costumes and jewelry to match; it has Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (of whom, likewise, little more is asked than to stand in the foreground of those pretty pictures – the film in no way engages with Grant’s presence in the way of the later North by Northwest). Certainly it has its recognizably “Hitchcockian” elements, but those elements seem generally disembodied, almost abstract, as such signalling a tendency which would become increasingly prominent in the director’s later work: consider for instance the placement and effect of such devices as the opening close-ups of screaming victims intercut with black cats on the roof; the cutting from a seduction scene to an explosion of fireworks (so overemphatic it almost transcends the cliché) and the almost equally overwhelming explosion of flowers during a chase scene; the use of back projection at various points; the costume party finale, with Grant (or is it?) clad in a bizarre black-masked get-up. The movie hints at psychosexual undercurrents of the kind that would be more fully developed in Marnie – Kelly’s Frances Stevens is a sexual aggressor with a somewhat sordidly facilitating mother, clearly drawn to Grant’s John Robie for his deviant past (and she’s not even the only age-inappropriate woman trying to throw herself at him) – but these remain defiantly underexplored, no less so than the weightless evocation of lingering allegiances and resentments dating back to the French resistance.

La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

Viewed from one perspective, Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one of the most specific films ever made about the creative process: it spends well over an hour of screen time observing the painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli, with a major assist from the hand of Bernard Dufour) as he prepares to paint a long-brooded-over project for which Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart) will serve as the model: his process involves first sketching in a book and then progressing to large canvases, studying her in ever-more rigorous poses in a search to excavate some kind of truth. One may often get lulled during these sections into the feeling of watching a form of displaced documentary, but Rivette’s rigour and scrutiny mystifies as much as it clarifies, and this is the source of the film’s true genius – to evoke, in a way which evades precise explanation no matter how often one sees the film, the capacity of art to bend perception and behaviour and understanding. Like many Rivette films, the film has elements of classic myth or fairy tale: Frenhofer’s vast home evokes an ancient castle with endless rooms and possibilities; his wife (Jane Birkin) evokes a lovely but somewhat doomed princess; there are hints of past traumas and conflicts which manifest themselves in various forms in the present; the finished painting is in various ways a site of danger and rupture, and must be banished for the sake of stability. All of this suggests an inwardness and hermeticism, but at the same time the film feels wondrously open and probing.The climax plays like a form of dance, the characters swirling around each other, testing new parameters and chemistries, but the final note suggests a wound that won’t readily be healed. The film is playful but never trivial, beautiful but never merely scenic, erotic but never prurient; it’s long (although not by Rivettian standards) but inexhaustible.

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)

Max Ophuls’ (or as the credits have it, Opuls’) The Reckless Moment is a fascinating incursion of noir-ish menace into superficially perfect domesticity, a thematic precursor of sorts to Blue Velvet. The two worlds cross in the opening sequence, as Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) drives from her bucolic small town into the sleazy heart of LA, to confront a low-life who’s dating her teenage daughter; within days, he’ll be dead, killed by the anchor attached to the family’s boat, and she’ll be dealing with a blackmailer, in possession of an intimate stash of letters. Ophuls portrays Lucia’s life as a relentless treadmill of undisciplined children, an ever-present and largely infantilized father-in-law (who sleeps in the same room as her young son), runaway expenses, and limited privacy, whether at home or elsewhere (this being a community where everyone knows everyone) – the husband’s chronic absence for work, even over Christmas, underlines the structural imbalances (the film’s treatment of the family’s black maid Sybil - a major supporting role for which Frances E. Williams goes scandalously uncredited – might warrant an essay in itself). The blackmailer Donnelly (the always marvelous James Mason) is as much poignantly would-be lover as adversary, seeing in Lucia’s life an embodiment of his own failure; and yet the movie suggests we’re merely observing contrasting forms of confinement (“You have your family, I have my Nagel,” says Donnelly in one of the film’s more memorably odd lines, referring to his menacing business partner) Ophuls presents the house as a spacious, materialist dream, its underbelly revealed through the vivid play of nighttime shadows. The ending closes off the incursion, reasserting the family imperative, but underlining the husband’s continuing absence; Ophuls’ brilliant framing leaves a sense of submergence and defeat as much as triumph. Further disquiet flows from the (still relevant) moral question that runs through the movie: how strongly should the interests of the privileged override the rights of a more visibly tainted underclass…?

Quelques jours avec moir (Claude Sautet, 1988)

The conventional view of Claude Sautet tends to overlook the frequent eccentricity of his narratives, and Quelques jours avec moi pushes that tendency almost to a break point, before the director’s two quieter final films. In disconcerting short order, a troubled retail executive (Daniel Auteuil, holding his cards close to the chest throughout) is released from a mental hospital and returns uneasily to work, then accepts a road trip to check out some underperforming stores before impulsively deciding to stay on in the first location he arrives at, Limoges, largely because of his attraction to a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) who works for the local store manager, and regardless that she continues her relationship with her boyfriend (Vincent Lindon). The plot goes on adding further elaboration, eventually and improbably embracing outright melodrama, but Sautet’s primary interest is in community and connection, in tracing how such an arbitrary-seeming trajectory might nevertheless provide the momentum that crosses lines of class and money and attitude and brings disparate people together. In this case the project takes on an air of borderline goofiness, as the chief of police and other pillars of the establishment take to partying or hanging out in dive bars with the dive bar crowd (the closing stretch of Mado comes heavily to mind here); fiscal and other transgressions are forgiven (and as an aside, has any other director seemed so intrigued by finance and accounting as a plot motor) and long-fractured relationships are refreshed. If the ending seems somewhat arbitrary and unresolved, it only underlines how the interest here is much more in the discoveries that attend the journey than in the arrival point. At times the movie may seem rather coarse and overdone, but even that much is refreshing for a director usually better remembered for small-scale observation and “humanism” than for his more elusively substantive traits.

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)

Shadows is as pleasurable to watch as any John Cassavetes film, although in a different way: perhaps as a more conventional verite-type experience. That’s partly on fairly simple grounds: it’s made up of shorter scenes, so that Cassavetes’ behavioural choreography emerges here more in spurts than in fully-developed dances; it’s more specifically rooted in a particular time and place (the many shots of movie theater and Broadway marquees, playing the likes of early Brigitte Bardot movies and the original production of The Most Happy Fella, almost constitute an engaging mini-documentary in themselves). The film makes a notable statement on race primarily by not making a notable statement about it, by structuring itself around three siblings of notably different skin tone and allowing the situation to speak for itself, by presenting inter-racial relationships that flow freely and naturally: the main plot point (insofar as there is one) involves the revelation of prejudice in a man who’s been pursuing Leila Goldoni’s character, but the film is fairly subtle in how it presents this. The closing titles emphasize for us that we’ve been watching an improvisation, and one certainly feels that in the naturalistic rhythms: more broadly though, the film is just as much about improvisation, about trying identities and mannerisms on for size, and perhaps ultimately starting to stumble toward a better sense of self (although, of course, the resolution is hardly that tidy). The film still feels (for lack of a better word) plain cool in a way that Cassavetes’ later films mostly consciously eschew – it channels an electrically aspirational milieu, set against an almost ever-present jazzy soundtrack. For all its many observational and performative grace notes though, one of the greatest passing pleasures comes from Cassavetes’ own brief, wordless but pugnacious appearance, even if it almost seems now to jolt us momentarily out of this movie and into (say) that of the more characteristic Husbands.

Days of Hate (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1954)

In its close concentration on an unhappily obsessed woman moving through a threat-laden environment, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s Days of Hate often feels strangely linked to a movie like John Parker’s Dementia, and not just because they’re both barely more than an hour long. For sure, it’s not a seamless correspondence: Dementia is fancifully and aggressively stylized, basing the woman’s trauma in a grotesque family tragedy; Days of Hate is always rooted in real settings – in the factory workplace and in the Buenos Aires streets – and the motivating event is much sadder. The fascinatingly grave Elisa Christian Galve plays Emma Zunz, her father dead by suicide after he was set up as the fall guy in a theft and her mother dead from grief; she fixates on getting revenge on the conniving, sleazy factory manager who set up the whole thing. The film is dense with problematic masculinity: the men are mostly dangerous pursuers and potential or actual rapists; others are psychically unsettling (on two separate occasions she refers in voice-over to the striking sadness of someone’s face) – even her love for her father manifests itself in a troublingly destabilizing form (the film shows that she remains capable of striking up connections, but they appear doomed to transience). The film is based on a short story by Borges, and although it doesn’t explicitly evoke the predominant notions of his work in that it’s not consciously labyrinthine or mythic, it carries a pervasive oneiric quality, the extremity of Emma’s focus on her quest creating its own unsettling texture. This carries through to the ending and beyond: she evades human justice, but feels already convicted by justice of another kind, and is last seen wandering the city as if zombie-like, perpetually removed and separated. Borges was apparently disappointed in the film, but on its own terms it’s unerringly full and fascinating.

The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)

Brian De Palma’s The Fury is thrilling and perplexing: it might have been designed as a test case for separating out a subject's mixed feelings about the director. The plot starts with the snatching of Robin Sandza, a telepathically gifted teenager, from his intelligence agent father (Kirk Douglas), in an operation overseen by the father’s colleague and supposed friend Childress (John Cassavetes). The elder Sandza goes undercover to find the boy: the plot expands to include another gifted teenager (Amy Irving), a benign research project and a nefarious one behind it. The film teems with sensational moments and sequences, showing off De Palma’s sensuous feeling for spatial relationships, his bravura use of slow motion, of silence, of startling camera angles, of lush orchestration. It’s hardly without feeling for actors either: Irving is touchingly troubled, Carrie Snodgress movingly doomed, and Douglas and Cassavetes are both seeped in resonance (even if their two sets of resonances barely seem to mesh). But the film’s point and meaning remain perpetually obscure: put simply, it seems unworthy of De Palma’s care and attention (regardless that it could almost be positioned as a sequel to his previous film Carrie). The opening scene in the “Middle East” carries a promise of political specificity, but it devolves from there into a generalized, uninformative paranoia about unknown government agencies that apparently operate with impunity (perhaps the theme of potentially transformative mental power becoming corrupted and self-destructive is intended to carry some broader resonance about the workings of authority). The film’s most interesting aspect is perhaps its bitter play with concepts of real and allegorical parenthood: the telepathic teenagers both shift from biological to symbolic fathers, with destabilizing results. There’s some bitter comedy in the dark ending to Douglas’ quest, and beyond that in the pyrotechnic fate of Cassavetes’ villain (which certainly looks like a homage to the climax of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, to complement the evocation of Hitchcock at various other points). But the film almost seems designed to confound any clear finding of meaning or significance.

Mado (Claude Sautet, 1976)

In some ways, Claude Sautet’s Mado is an inversion of his earlier Max et les ferrailleurs, which followed a protagonist played by Michel Piccoli as his scheming leads him to personal disaster and isolation; Mado starts with a no-less-consumed Piccoli protagonist, Simon, but this time the journey leads to an extended and surprising vision of community. Just as with Sautet’s Cesar and Rosalie, there’s an apparent structural oddity in the title: Mado isn’t the main character (she’s a prostitute with whom Simon has a relationship that causes him as much angst as pleasure), and her fate isn’t the film’s predominant preoccupation. Rather, her role seems more that of catalyst, bringing disparate people together, allowing rebirths and realignments. The fact that the film’s narrative is driven by financial difficulties of a very similar kind to those that drove Yves Montand’s character in Vincent, Francois, Paul…et les autres provides another instance of the rich interconnection of Sautet’s work during this (peak) period in his career. For a while, Mado seems cluttered and lacking in momentum, weighed down by the sprawling plot and the surfeit of characters, but this all peaks about half an hour before the end, when Simon executes a play that turns the table on his economic adversary, putting him in possession of a large expanse of development-ready land. The film then becomes an unexpected mixture of travelogue and celebration: a diverse, loosely-constituted group assembles to drive out and survey the territory, crashing a wedding celebration on the way back and then after an ill-advised detour getting stuck in mud and spending the night in dance, play and reverie (however, cutaways to the much grimmer, and directly-related fate, of another key character reminds us that such renewals are seldom without collateral damage). It’s implied at the end that through these experiences, Simon is finally able to move on from Mado; the last scene hints at a truer relationship with an old acquaintance played by Romy Schneider, another echo of all the other films mentioned...