In France the past master of the movie made out of sketches was Julien Duvivier;no other director came close in this field .He never collaborated with other directors in this genre and his shorts were never included in those portmanteau movies made by different artists .
"La française et l'amour" is panned by most of the French critics ,but when they wrote off the French cinema of the fifties as dismal ,they neglected many good works :nowadays ,some of them tend to reverse their opinion.
"La française et l'amour" does not hold a candle to the Italian equivalents of the time ;a curate's egg best describes it.
Take the first one :it was made by a director on the decline, Henri Decoin ,but who,along with Duvivier and Clouzot ,lent credibility to French films noirs ;here his segment deals on a (at the time) taboo subject ;in 1960 , one rarely told the children how babies were made ; this may be a farce ,but parents did not know how to tell them the truth ;it would be 1968 before sex education really appeared .
Delannoy was one of the two main bete noires of the nouvelle vague, but he made many good movies ignored by the snobs ;his segment ,supposed to depict teenage angst falls flat though;and Roger Pierre,a comic actor ,as the Prince Charming ,well....
Boisrond is probably the most mediocre director of the batch ;his segment ,dealing with virginity , is totally bland and dull ,with poor acting at that .
Things go better (it could not get worse) with the following segment ,directed by celebrated René Clair ,helped by two wonderful actors , Claude Rich and Marie-José Nat : the honeymoon and the first row , because of a hat , of another man and another woman on the train ,and of cutting remarks about the bride's family ; Clair's sketch has elegance going for it.
Henri Verneuil , generally overlooked by the highbrows,but adored by the mainstream audience (whom I side with) ,manages pretty well with adulterer : deadpan Paul Meurisse, charming Dany Robin and handsome cynical Belmondo ,with a good supporting role by Claude Piéplu as a boring guest at the restaurant give the segment wit ,and the husband's final trick is smart.
Christian-Jaque ,another legend of the French cinema ,was a spent force in the sixties , but his sketch ,very well acted by two luminaries Annie Girardot and François Périer ,treats divorce in a very original way : both want to get divorce , but they've got no reason why. You must accuse your spouse , if you want to get divorce , it's the law !So their lawyers begin to set the wife against the hubby and vice versa; it sometimes verges on absurd ,which is fine with me.
You can stop here for the last sketch ,directed by the second bete noire of the NV ,Jean-Paul LE Chanois -who did produce good works in the late forties / early fifties,I insist -is rubbish ;Robert Lamoureux is ideally cast as a crook ,but the story never takes off ,after a promising start with Simone Renant's speech for his defence. The screenplay totally misses the point , beauty Martine Carol as a lonely heart?
An erratic work : by keeping segments 4,5 and 6 you get an enjoyable film ;at 132 min, it's overlong.
