A Young Man's Frenzy

The Girl with the Golden Eyes. One gloomy and romantic afternoon in Paris an arrogant young rip (Paul Guers) strolls out of his expensive flat and--hello! A beautiful girl (Marie Laforet) is sitting in his sports car. Her eyes are large and soulful. One elegant long finger rests lightly on her lips. "Another one breathing down my neck," he thinks. "We'll see about that." He jumps in the driver's seat. She seems startled, tries to leave. "You'll be sorry," he snarls with a smile as he grabs her wrist and starts the car. She twists free and runs away. He shrugs. That's that.

Not quite. That night the young man sees the same girl standing in the rain and watching him. He chases her, catches her just at the door of her house, eases her upstairs. Diable! She lives in a suite of decadent splendors : baroque candelabrum, Chinese madonna, canopied bed, pair of pigeons murmuring in the dimness amorously. Obviously a love nest. But who is her lover? She will not tell. She will not even tell her own name.

In a few days the young dog is leashed.

But how can he marry a nameless woman whom he shares with a nameless lover? Befuddled, the bachelor turns for advice to a woman of the world (Franc,oise Prevost), intelligent and dependably unemotional. Yet when he shows her a picture of the girl the woman suddenly turns pale and hurries away. Why? Obviously, the woman is the other dove in the nest. Not so obviously, she is also in love with the hero. Any other questions? The film answers them in passably explicit detail and with a sick romantic energy that Honore de Balzac, who wrote the tale (La Fille aux Yeux d'Or) on which the film is based, would surely have admired. Like the story the film has style, the grand fantastic style in which, as in a jungle, excess exceeds excess and every thing is reconciled in riot. Setting, lighting, cutting, acting: all are overdone to a degree -- but to the same degree. The elements of the film are in phase; its world is impossible but consistent, therefore credible.

Startling that a film so skillful could be made by a man so young: Director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco is only 26. True, he has had help from his family. His father, a well-known photographer, is in charge of his camera, and his wife is his leading lady. She plays with an easy and spontaneous grace, and she looks, in her moments of limp asthenic loveliness, like an undine sighing in the Seine.

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