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...Thérèse tells a wicked tale wrought from François Mauriac's 1927 novel Thérèse Desqueyroux and tells it in old-fashioned cinematic style. It is literate, formal, filmed with impeccable taste. It captures the dark spirit of Mauriac's novel almost too perfectly. Best of all, in Emmanuèle Riva (star of Hiroshima, Mon Amour) it has a vivid Thérèse, that young woman so desperate to escape "the slow, sure, horrible suffocation of provincial life" that she poisons her husband...
Bernard survives, however. He even lies to save her, and as Thérèse rides home from court to try to tell him why she did it, her unhappy history is reviewed in flashbacks. Here, the prose narrative becomes a burdensome, bookish device, but Director Georges Franju finds visual poetry in sharp contrasts between the gentle Bordeaux countryside and the taut, terrible stillness of Thérèse's face. Actress Riva never fails him. On her wedding day, "the wild force seething inside," she stands in church like someone paralyzed by news of disaster...
Does Bernard forgive her? Never. In a final scene flickering with pathos, he breaks down and asks: "Was it because you hated me? You couldn't stand me?" Half-mockingly, Thérèse replies: "It was because of your pines ... I wanted them for myself. Perhaps it was to see a glimmer of uncertainty in your eyes." Author Mauriac, who wrote the dialogue for this first screen adaptation of his work, supplies no simple answer. A connoisseur of human corruption, he peoples his novels with characters sidetracked by evil in their blind search for God. On film...
...killed in a plane crash in 1949, and her first marriage ended in divorce. Four separate automobile accidents all but crushed her frail body, and she was racked with ulcers, jaundice, arthritis, and cirrhosis of the liver. She took to drugs and young men, married her second husband, Hairdresser Théo Sarapo, 25, only last year, when she was 46. Each misfortune marred her voice but only seemed to give new poignancy to her artistry. Despite doctors' warnings, the nearly crippled singer insisted on going on tour because she had to "sing to live." Said she: "Each pain...
Built on the rise of the Guadarrama mountain range 31 miles from Madrid, El Escorial casts such a gloomy aspect that the Romantic Poet Théophile Gautier called it the "granite debauch of Spain's Tiberius." Even its floor plan reflects a grim occasion. The monastery is named in honor of a humble 3rd century deacon who was burned alive on a gridiron by his Roman torturers. San Lorenzo, it is said, calmly instructed the Romans: "This side's done. You can turn me over now." His coolness under trial won him a lasting place in Spanish...