SUNDAYS AND CYBÈLE (1962)

Pierre (Hardy Kruger, pictured) was a French pilot in the Indochinese war and has traumatic flashbacks of strafing innocent civilians from his bomber, including a young girl who holds his gaze seconds before her death. Hospitalized for some time, he now lives with his former nurse (and possibly casual mistress) Madeleine (Nicole Courcel) and is still fairly fragile, suffering from bouts of amnesia. One day he witnesses a father dropping his daughter Francoise (Patricia Gozzi) off at a convent boarding school. She's sad but the father seems glad to be rid of her, and despite telling her he'll visit on Sundays, Pierre overhears him getting on a train with no intention of returning. On Sunday, Pierre goes to the school and, posing as her father, takes her for the day, exploring a nearby park. Like Pierre, Francoise seems to be dealing with some childhood trauma. At one point, she tells him that Francoise is not her real name, but she won't say what is. Over their Sundays together, they grow close, like real family. He's 30 and she's 12, and she says she wants to marry him when she's 18. The two are like two innocent children—it's implied that Pierre is seeking redemption from having killed children in the war. Eventually, Madeleine realizes what's going on. After seeing them interact in the park, she sees them as two damaged innocents having found solace with each other, but others see perversion rearing its ugly head, including Bernard, a doctor and rival for Madeleine's affections. At Christmas, as Pierre is trying to give her a special holiday, Francoise gives him a gift: her real name (Cybèle) written on a piece of paper and put in a small gift box. While trying to get a special gift for her (a rooster on a church steeple that she wants), everything falls apart.

I'm not sure how modern viewers, who have been trained (and generally rightfully so) to see ugly desires in an age-inappropriate relationship, would react to this tale. A review from 1962 indicates surprise that people would read pederastic tendencies into Pierre, but obviously we are meant to have that reaction, at least to some degree. Kruger plays Pierre with great sensitivity but with hints that he himself is uncomfortable with how emotionally powerful his bond with Cybèle becomes. A shot of him carrying Cybèle in his arms has been compared by some critics to the famous scene of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster lakeside with the little girl who he winds up drowning, and there is a scene in which Pierre becomes violent at a bumper car ride. Courcel is very good at registering her own mixed emotions, and Gozzi, who actually was 12 at the time of filming, is astonishing at expressing a wide array of feelings with regard to Pierre. Though she gets angry when she sees him react to others with violence, she is never actually scared of him; she seems to understand his fragility. Shot in black & white, and largely out of doors, it always seems like a gray and gloomy day, even when Pierre and Cybèle are at their happiest. Kruger is movie-star handsome, which makes it all the more impressive that he comes off as such a slight and tentative person. Ultimately, we are meant to believe that Pierre is not dangerous, and that his attentions are good for Cybèle, but we're also meant to see that their relationship could not have lasted in this world. An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, this seems to have faded from notoriety, though it is part of the Criterion Collection and is worth seeing. [TCM]