Word: piccoli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...talent found outside the Montand family, I was particularly impressed by Michel Piccoli, whose portrait of the unhappy clerk is a small masterpiece. Perspiring as freely as he fantasizes, nervously smoothing his sparse, slicked-down hair, and curling his lips into a tobacco-stained smile, Piccoli is simultaneously poignant, and repulsive. Charles Denner, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Claude Mann never fail to be compelling as a cynically belligerent smark aleck, Miss Signoret's languidly egotistical lover, and a charming but distant policeman, respectively...
Here's the action: maid Celestine (Moreau) arrives in Normandy from Paris, to work at a manor. Immediately begins a tableau of lives ruled and twisted by the sexual impulse. The lady of the manor is conspicuously frigid, her husband (brilliantly acted by Michel Piccoli) comically virile. "Watch out for that guv." Celestine is warned, "with him: one shot--POW!--a baby...
Godard muddles an already tricky narrative with personal mannerisms and outright irrelevancies. Brigitte Bardot is a sullen enigma as the wife, and Michel Piccoli as the husband is merely opaque. Hollywood's Jack Palance makes the producer seem to be none other than Jack Palance...