The New Wave Rolls On

The Lovers (Zenith International), swimming out of La Nouvelle Vague (TIME, Nov. 16) without any clothes on, has made quite a financial splash. The picture has already grossed $360,000 in Paris --the returns are not yet in from the back country, where the movie is still showing --and in the U.S. it has broken box-office records all around the art-house circuit.

Made by Louis Malle. 27, a wealthy young sugar-beetnik from northern France, the film runs through an old-fashioned romantic tale, updated from an 18th century novelette by Dominique Vivant Denon. about a well-to-do young wife (Jeanne Moreau) in a small provincial town. Her publisher husband (Alain Cuny) spends most of his time putting the paper to bed. So the wife visits friends in Paris, drifts into a well-why-not affair with a cafe-society type (Jose-Luis de Villalonga). Suspicious, the husband invites the lover home one weekend and plays a sneaky, overcivilized game of cat and mouse with the guilty pair.

That night, sick of her senseless life and ready for anything, the wife takes a midnight stroll in her nightgown through moonlit meadows. She meets a young archaeologist (Jean-Marc Bory), a chance guest in the house. He kisses her. Suddenly, deliriously, they understand that "this is the real thing''--or so the narrator says. Les amoureux then go back to her room, and with the sound track blaring Brahms (a sextet, naturally) and the camera calmly watching almost everything that happens, they make passionate and explicitly French love 1) in her bed, 2) in the bathtub, 3) back in bed again. Whereupon the wife, without a second's hesitation or a backward glance, walks out on her husband, her former lover and her small daughter. The couple simply pile into his car and drive off into the dawn. "But," the narration concludes in tones of soaring triumph, "she regretted nothing."

It is unlikely that American moviegoers will see what the French claim to see in this picture. The love scenes, though beautifully played and photographed, will seem to U.S. eyes a snuffling intrusion on the soulful mood--obviously stuck in for their shock value. To the French, who perhaps understand these things better but who certainly sentimentalize the physical side of love, the lust of the lovers is full of spiritual beauty. The picture has had a strong impact in the small towns of France, where apparently a Madame Bovary is still born every minute, and the heroine, who will seem to U.S. audiences no more than a roundheeled dunce, has become a national heroine of the French ''a sort of Joan of Arc of the boudoir.''

The Cousins (Films-Around-the-World), another immensely popular picture produced by the New Wave, is a fairly clever, mildly depressing study of France's I-got-it-beat generation. Made for $160,000 by a 27-year-old film critic named Claude Chabrol, the film offers a switch on the story of the city mouse (Jean-Claude Brialy) and the country mouse (Gerard Blain). In this case the city mouse is really a rat. Enrolled in law school, he seldom attends classes, spends his time shacking up with "can't-say-no girls," arranging for abortions, curing one hangover and planning the next. When the country cousin, a nice boy not too bright in school, comes to live with him, the rat nibbles away at the country boy's time, his girl friend (Juliette Mayniel), and his will to work. In the end the country cousin fails his examinations and the city cousin casually shoots him dead with a gun he didn't know was loaded. And that, the moral would seem to be, is one way to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree.

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