Word: garcin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Perhaps everyone is resting." Everything, in other words, is equivocal. The only certainty is that Destroy, She Said is a perfect cinema parody of the maddening affectations of the French anti-novelists. During vacation week at a hotel (no, not Marienbad) in the middle of a forest, Professor Henri Garcin is seduced by another woman (Catherine Sellers) as his young wife (Nicole Hiss) looks vacantly into the camera and does a lot of wondering about illusion and reality. She is consoled by a writer (Michel Lonsdale) who talks a lot about being Jewish (no, not Philip Roth). Nothing happens...
...this slapstick comedy, even the Occupation takes second place to the preoccupation-cherchez la femme. The plot is as old as Gaul, and only a new director would have the gall to tell it again: the sleepy middle-aged husband, the nubile wife, the young stranger (Henri Garcin). But Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 33, has an appetite for the absurd and an unerring eye for casting. An actor in the mugging tradition of Toto and Fernandel, Philippe Noiret is excellent as the pawky, paunchy husband; and Catherine Deneuve, as his restless wife, is as light and tart as a lemon souffl...