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Renoir managed it in Partie de Campagne. David Lean attempted it in Brief Encounter and Summer Madness. Garbo implied it in almost every film she made. But considering the cinema’s preoccupation with the trimmings and trappings of courtship, there has been an astonishing reluctance even by the most enterprising writers and directors to study what happens to their heroines when they fall in love. Most films reduce the complexities to a prosaic statement of fact, often simplifying things still further by using love at first sight as motivation for all that follows. But recently, as the tendency has increased for the screen to break away from predominately narrative forms towards a more reflective examination of character and feeling, four films have probed the subject of women in love with a new and often startling intensity.

     Louis Malle’s Les Amants, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, Peter Brook’s Moderato Cantabile (so far shown here only at last year’s London Film Festival) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura are unconventional films, and the demands which their leisurely tempos make upon audiences might appear to make them uncommercial. (The venomous prophecies of box-office disaster with which the trade press greeted L’Avventura, which subsequently broke all records for the Paris-Pullman, have probably never been matched.) In fact the three publicly presented in this country have enjoyed remarkable success, and the theme which they each in different ways explore seems likely to become a more popular one. So, too, does the basic approach, generally and perhaps misleadingly considered as closer to that of the novel than of the film.

     It’s easy enough to see why the idea that this kind of film-making is rather more literary than cinematic should have gained wide acceptance. Psychology has always been the novel’s business. The cinema has generally been more content with action than behaviour; but these four films are less concerned with what happens than with why and how it happens. The story of each could be told in a fraction of their running time.

     Despite the ‘literary’ association, they actually depend less than most productions on their formal scripts. Antonioni, the most precise and penetrating of these directors, never works from a written script; while Marguerite Duras’s self-consciously literary dialogue for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Moderato Cantabile is among these films’ most unhappy weaknesses. On the other hand those resources of the cinema which are often little more than tools in translating the script to the screen here become vital. The concentration on characterization gives the direction of performances a new importance. The relationship between the characters and settings is so significant that it needs camerawork and sound recording which can economically evoke the atmosphere of any location. And the development of emotion rather than incident calls for new, often revolutionary concepts of editing. These films may show the cinema working in a new way; but that is not to say that they lean on the styles or techniques of another medium.

     All four films consider the behaviour of a woman following an apparently illogical course because of her irrational love for a man. In Les Amants the bored, pampered heroine abandons her husband, child and her accepted lover to run off with a stranger who has given her complete physical fulfilment (a point obscured here by the busy scissors of the British Board of Film Censors). In Hiroshima Mon Amour a French actress working on a pacifist film in Japan finds that a strange relationship between the devastation of Hiroshima and her own experience of being shaved and shunned after her German soldier lover was shot by the Resistance so intensifies her love for a Japanese architect (who, like her, is married) that she considers staying with him in Japan. Moderato Cantabile shows an industrialist’s wife who has overheard a crime of passion discussing it with a stranger until their situation parallels that of the victim and murderer. The heroine of L’Avventura unsuccessfully struggles against falling in love with the lover of her best friend whose mysterious disappearance brings them together in a long and steadily more reluctant search. These sharply focused heroines and their emotional crises are each intended to reveal something of a woman’s need for and abandonment to love and, perhaps, something of the nature of love itself.

     The heroine of Les Amants, played by Jeanne Moreau, makes what appears to be the biggest and most dramatic sacrifice. Her husband, a prosperous provincial newspaper proprietor, is admittedly a somewhat pompous figure who spares her little time from his work; and the Spanish polo-player she has taken as her current gigolo is hardly much of a loss. But she hints at some motherly feeling for her young daughter, and scarcely seems the kind to abandon her luxurious standard of living without a qualm. Yet any regrets she has are so speedily quashed that her decision and departure take only a matter of minutes. Moreover, as the first half of the film has been tentatively mocking the brittle society in which she exists, the love which makes her run from it seems to be held out as some kind of solution, almost salvation.

     It’s reasonable, then, to ask that this passion be intensely, explicitly revealed as something quite irresistible. But what kind of love is, in fact, presented? The young stranger who gives the heroine a lift after her car has broken down has hardly the most striking of personalities. (The failure of all these films to make their heroes’ attraction for their heroines entirely convincing is as notable as the dull performance of each of the male leads.) We are shown that unlike the men she knows this man is not afraid to treat her as the pampered, selfish child that she is, an adequate enough reason for her curiosity but scarcely for her eventual flight.

     The stranger, invited to stay the night by the husband, sits silently through a grotesque dinner-party at which the woman s husband and lover complacently expose their own boorishness. After everyone else is asleep, the stranger sees the wife dawdling through the moonlit garden in her nightdress. He joins her, and in a long, exquisitely photographed sequence they wander together through the grounds, lie in each other’s arms in a boat, and finally reach the woman s bedroom. This is undeniably one of the cinema’s most genuinely atmospheric scenes. The director justifiably eschews realism and captures the romantic, increasingly erotic tension which precedes the consummation of any unplanned act of love. With such a prelude it would be extraordinary if these lovers did not enjoy profound satisfaction. It is not the director’s fault that the version shown here leads to nothing more than one of the censors’ crude excisions; but what has not been remarked is that even in the uncut original the climax we witness seems a mild awakening for a woman who, husband apart, has had at least one and probably a succession of lovers since her marriage. Are we supposed to believe that this is the experience which determines her to abandon everything? We have already seen her selfishness to be of a kind more likely to keep her at home where the money is than to send her off with the stranger in the morning. Nothing we have been shown seems likely to have aroused the kind of romanticism which welcomes insecurity. If she was putting self-interest first, she would stay where she was; and if she put her feelings first, she would surely be more hesitant about leaving her little girl. However the character is interpreted, her behaviour has the illogicality not of love but of inadequate motivation. And even if we were convinced, her departure is no kind of conclusion. What comes next will be infinitely more revealing than anything that has gone before.

     The heroine of Hiroshima Mon Amour seems at first a more attractive character, though she dismisses her unseen husband and children from her calculations even more casually. Emmanuele Riva’s performance suggests a warm, impetuous woman prepared to be matter-of-fact about adultery and taken pleasantly by surprise when this affair offers more than a glimmer of love. Resnais begins his film only a little earlier than Malle stops by showing the love-making which, the film later implies, began with an easy bar pick-up. The opening reel, intercutting close-ups of the lovers’ entwined bodies with the horrors of past and present Hiroshima, has the immediate fascination and poetry of an adventurous essay in avant-garde film-making — until calmer consideration shows that the analogies the sequence is intended to make are meaningless.

     The rest of the film is concerned with the actress’s uncertainty whether she should stay with her new lover. She argues that she will be able to forget him, and at his encouragement relates the nightmarish conclusion of her first love affair and the temporary madness which followed. Again a false analogy between love and the Bomb is offered. She has been able to forget her ordeal just as Japan and the world have been able to forget Hiroshima. Forgetfulness may be a sad solution, but if it can make such tragedies bearable she reasons that it can surely answer this situation. Meanwhile the telling of her story has revealed another aspect of her character, an indulgence in self-pity which is heightened by the suspiciously sadistic eagerness of the architect for ever more precise recollections. By the time she has finished any sympathy which her story has won has been outweighed by distaste for the manner in which she has told it.

     Her argument, in any case, is wholly out of character. This intellectual rationalization of her situation, and the decision to base her action on an analysis of her feelings after her first affair can only be the result of a cool, almost scientific judgement. Why should this woman, so far effectively presented as possessing an impulsive, passionate temperament, argue and act from logic rather than from instinct? Ironically her personality and circumstances appear more likely to provoke the abandonment of the heroine of Les Amants, just as that woman’s self-centred, calculating mind would — granted an equally hard intelligence — be capable of the logic of the heroine of Hiroshima Mon Amour.

     Resnais has said, ‘I’m showing an example, that’s all . . . I have no particular liking for my heroine.’ One French critic has suggested that Resnais is a misogynist who set out to make a film that would appeal to women’s most masochistic instincts. But whatever the reason for his somewhat aloof detachment, his forfeiture of the conventional techniques of winning audiences’ sympathy by appealing to their sense of self-identification finally boomerangs. He alienates not only sympathy but concern. His ‘example’ dwindles into an individual whose experiences are too remote to connect with our own and whose reaction is too contradictory to hold either conviction or significance.

     The film is also interested in the broader aspects of love. It attempts to ally the heroine’s predicament with a suggestion that love is the only answer to inhumanity, even to the nuclear atrocities committed by the West. But this is only fuzzily inferred in noticeable contrast to the sharpness with which the director treats, say, the heroine’s moment of tortured indecision in a hotel corridor, or the attempt of another Japanese to pick her up. And the brilliance of Resnais’s frequently revolutionary techniques sometimes so dominates the film that these issues are veiled still more. Hiroshima Mon Amour is among the rare films which enlarge the potentialities of the cinema. But the incoherence of its social comment means that it must be considered as a study of its heroine and here, too, it fails.

     Moderato Cantabile attempts an experiment in some ways bolder than anything in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and we have Peter Brook’s word for it that Marguerite Duras, who wrote them both, felt that here she was going ‘beyond’ Hiroshima. The film, adapted by Duras from her own novel, concerns the neglected wife of a rich industrialist who spends most of her time with the young son she idolizes. During his piano lesson they overhear a scream. Confusion breaks out in the street below, and the woman joins the crowd outside a bar where the body of a girl is lying on the floor. The police lead out her fierce, intent young killer. The woman gets into conversation with an onlooker, one of her husband’s workers. They meet again and again, and their conversation always centres around the murderer’s possible motive. A tension develops between them, but they never embrace.

     Brook invites us to judge the whole film on a single shot. This is how he describes the scene in an interview published in Films and Filming: ‘She’s leaning against the tree, in the dusk, in a square; and she takes the hand of the man who’s standing with her, and forces him to play with her head until she gets sufficiently worked up to start banging her head against the tree, whereupon he pulls his hand away.’ Later the woman gets a little drunk and embarrasses her husband and guests at a dinner-party. When the workman eventually chooses to leave her, she falls to the floor of the bar where the girl was killed and utters the same terrible cry.

     It’s impossible to submit the behaviour of this woman to anything like the analysis which the heroines of the other three films will bear. Almost from the outset she seems to build and indulge in her relationship with the passive workman solely for want of some better pastime. If her actions sprang from some complexity of character she would at least be interesting; as it is she appears merely tiresome and rather ridiculous.

     This is scarcely the actress’s fault, though Jeanne Moreau is now becoming so identified with idle, rich and slightly stupid characters that the casting hardly helps. The real trouble lies in the theory with which Brook approached the film. To return to the tree scene for a moment, he comments, ‘Because both of them (the players) know the depth of the novel they play that scene with an intensity which gives each gesture a certain force, which makes that shot something that even if you take it out of context and show it to someone who has never seen the film they will be compelled to take an interest because somewhere behind these faces there’s a force, an emotion in these people’s inside. And you’re looking at the outside, as you would if you looked across a restaurant and there was somebody among all the people there in such a true emotional state that you’d be riveted and say, ‘What’s the matter with her?” And it is that that is the basis of this whole picture.’

     Brook calls his film an ‘anti-audience’ production. ‘We take away the element of narrative; we avoid scenes, big scenes in the dramatic sense; and we avoid emphasis, avoid underlining and pointing a thing.’ His sole method in portraying the all-important inner life of his heroine (‘. . . in terms of her life, in terms of a single human being, this is the total vast, definitive, tragic and vital happening,’ Brook has said) is by the technique of his actress who, he claims, ‘characterizes like a medium’. He supports his theory by referring to audience reaction to television. ‘You personally must immediately judge objectively your relationship to the face . . . which comes out of the blue into your room,’ he says, explaining that this is the outlook he wants the audience to bring to the film. But his examples are taken from actuality television, and refer to our reaction to ‘real’ people, not actors. Our attitude towards television drama is quite different to the way in which we watch newsreels or interviews. Even documentary, for all its apparent closeness to the factual, is distinguished by the shaping and pointing which has gone into the preparation. The most effective moments in Moderato Cantabile are those which, despite Brook’s theory, have been dramatically treated — the piano lesson, the heavily stylized dinner-party. And Brook himself seems to recognize the inadequacy of his method, for at moments of crisis he intercuts long travelling shots of silhouetted trees, of water, of bannister rails, of anything to provide by means of mood association the feeling his theory has inevitably jettisoned. ‘The person who goes to see this film . . . who goes to woo the picture, will find a great deal,’ insists Brook, somewhat impudently insinuating that criticism can only mean a failure of response rather than any failure of expression. There are unlikely to be any further leaps from Brook’s theoretical springboard; but at least Moderato Cantabile has established that letting the camera stalk an actress exuding empathy for a character in a novel which the audience may not have read is an inadequate way of communicating her emotional stress.

     Antonioni unostentatiously uses all the cinema’s resources which Peter Brook struggles to neglect. L’Avventura, a superlative technical accomplishment, probes deep into the agonies and ecstasies of love, packing the zig-zag folds of its story so firmly that the emotional honesty comes thrusting through. This heroine is less at home in the leisured, moneyed world in which she moves. There are few hints about her background, but she seems to have been taken up by the diplomat’s daughter who is the subject of the search. She reacts to the first gesture by the architect, when within minutes of his fiancée’s disappearance he holds her arm a moment longer than she needs for support, with incredulity. When he later embraces her she protests fiercely, but already something of the inevitability of the affair has touched her. Between them Monica Vitti and Antonioni make her the most intelligent of heroines, quite free from the irritating emptiness at times displayed by the women in the other three films. She knows that to submit to the attraction she feels towards this man can only lead to betrayal and suffering; but common sense and logic are a poor defence against her feelings.

     Antonioni bangs us into the consummation of the affair with the film’s one abrupt cut, an exact reflection of the suddenness of the girl’s decision. The search becomes almost a formality, but the missing girl’s shadow, sometimes grey, sometimes black, remains between the lovers. The heroine is troubled by her betrayal but cannot regret her decision, though every couple they encounter seem to stress the temporary nature of her happiness. A chemist and his wife are seen savaging each other after a few weeks of marriage; a humiliated woman revenges herself on her husband by enjoying an egocentric boy painter. The only pleasure the lovers witness is in a boy’s attempt to pick up a girl during a train journey, a curious, surprisingly patronizing scene at odds with Antonioni’s melancholy talent. As in all his films virtually every scene has the sad nostalgia of an act performed for the last time, as if the world had been condemned to die the next day.

     The architect, though stodgily played, is a convincing character, a man guiltily aware of having sold his integrity by prostituting his talents. No longer capable of love, he can escape only in aimless destruction. He casually betrays his new mistress with an absurd little starlet at the moment when she has almost forgotten the inevitability of his unfaithfulness. Yet the film’s conclusion, one of the most perfect in the cinema’s history, shows her unhappy gesture of forgiveness. Nothing is solved; they both know that he will almost certainly destroy her as often as she returns to him. But they have achieved, in Antonioni’s words, ‘a kind of shared pity’.

     L’Avventura has none of the convenient intellectual vagueness shown by Malle, Resnais and Brook, yet it splits audiences unpredictably. But allowing for reactions against the tempo and style the principal division may be between those who believe themselves — and therefore others — capable of rational behaviour under every circumstance, and those whose temperament or experience tells them otherwise. Antonioni has expressed the film’s hard challenge in an interview: ‘I wanted to show that sentiments which convention and rhetoric have encouraged us to regard as having a kind of definite weight and absolute duration can in fact be fragile, vulnerable, subject to change. Man deceives himself when he hasn’t courage enough to allow for new dimensions in emotional matters — his loves, regrets, states of mind — just as he allows for them in the field of science and technology . . . L’Avventura naturally does not pretend to have the answer to the disturbing questions it raises. It’s enough for me to have posed them in cinematic terms.’

     These four films offer several lessons for those who will follow the new path. Allowing a heroine unlimited time and money may so divorce her from ordinary experience that her behaviour seems little more than indulgence in an eccentric whim. But discreetly treated a luxury setting can eliminate the distractions of the chores of daily life and permit a deeper, more profitable concentration on the emotions. At the same time we may yet see a director who expresses his theme principally in terms of the kind of daily routine which has so far been avoided. New styles are called for, but the temptation to exploit new techniques for their own sake instead of putting them quietly at the service of the theme is considerable. Exceptional ability on the part of the leading actress might appear crucial, but the performances of these principals, matching the mood and morality of each film (self-indulgent Moreau, self-pitying Riva, vital, intelligent Vitti) indicates that apt casting and firm direction can be enough.

     With the unpredictability of love as a major element, writers and directors may feel free to manipulate their heroines through almost any attractive plot. But characterization and behaviour could never be more interdependent. Antonioni alone has solved this by what French critics have called his ‘interior realism’. Conviction that this woman under this emotion would behave this way is essential. Without this conviction, the emotions and impulses become distorted and relation to our own experience is severed. No matter how individual the heroine’s circumstances and story, her feelings must have a common truth if the production is to make any universal point. Only then can a film begin to equal the achievement of a L’Avventura by compelling any re-examination of our ideas of morality, behaviour and, above all, of women.