Word: broca
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hiss: Brendan Gill of the New Yorker says: "The girl wants the young man to marry her, so she can start having a family... Philippe de Broca stops at nothing in the way of gags and tricks to make us laugh...
...Five-Day Lover. France's Philippe de Broca (The Love Game) has produced a minor comic mattresspiece in which hero (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and heroine (Jean Seberg) tear up the sheets with hilarious abandon; but then at the last minute, the director figuratively draws the sheets over the lovers' faces-the contemporary bedroom, he seems to be saying, is a morgue...
...comedy widens and the laughter dies in the spectator's belly as he perceives that the froth is bubbling from the lips of a corpse, from the sores of a rotting civilization. The effect is disturbing and profound. In his third feature film Director Philippe de Broca (The Love Game, The Joker) emerges as a narrow but brilliant comic poet, the melancholy master of a strange rose-black hilarity perhaps best described as laughter through screams...
...even as his champagne cocktail rises to full fizz, De Broca drops the Mickey in. Gradually he lets it be seen that none of the characters is really living his own life, that all instead are playing safe by playing roles, the usual overcivilized charades. Mistress No. 1, a successful couturiére, lives a man's life because she is afraid to be a woman. But she is also afraid to be alone, especially at night, so she rents a sheep she can count on till she falls asleep. The hero himself, more honest and more naive than...
...husband, a grubby little librarian whose lifework is a thesis on an obscure medieval plumber, is the most pitiful and yet by all odds the most human of De Broca's characters. He knows very well that his wife is unfaithful yet he hides what he knows, partly because he loves his wife, partly because he despises himself, mostly because he is afraid to rock the boat. When she runs off to assignations he stays home to mind the babies; when she comes home he tells her how fresh her skin looks, how bright her eyes are. And sometimes...