Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first act is too long--it goes on for two hours. All this time is spent working out the details of a plot which is meant to be too involved for me to be able to summarize it. But this isn't the kind of force in which the structure of the plot itself is the entertainment--doors constantly opening and closing: first one then two characters forced to hide in the closet. Here the plot is about as lissome as a set of steel girders on which to hang puns, blowing like so many colored handkerchiefs with the command...
...look breathtaking. Yet he relies so heavily on static concepts of photography that the effects wears off rather quickly. His characters seem posed and reposed for visual effect, instead of directed for dramatic effect, so that the action bogs down after the first half hour. Aimless directing, a weak plot, liteless characterization and a preposterous script do nothing to keep things moving. The effect is something like watching an animated issue of Vogue magazine...
...content with just visual eroticism, director Just Jaeckin tries to convince us that he's making a serious philosophical statement on human sensuality. He fails not so much because he lack the originality and the wit of a director like Bertolucci but because his effort is transparently insincere. His plot is so poorly planned and the lofty lines of his script are so dull and pointless that it just looks like he had nothing to say and knew...
...CAMPAIGN boasts about the plot, but the story is a vague, improbable fantasy about an elite society of aristocratic decadent French diplomats marooned in Thailand with no one to talk to but each other's wives. These men and women live in splendid Thai places, sunbathe and give parties, and murmur complacently that "our only enemy is boredom." Their unwritten rule is to fight boredom." Their unwritten rule is to fight boredom by making love. Throughout the movie the characters keep asking each other if they are bored, and the response is predictable...
...married to one of the rising junior execs of the Diplomatic Service, is the wide-eyed innocent, the Candy of the French screen, who with surprising diligence and seriousness tries to fit into her husband's social milieu: as she says, to become a "true wife" to him. Whatever plot there is stems from her alternating distaste and awe towards this glittering, exotic, useless way of life. Yet the conflict between her resistance on the one hand and the constant sexual wooing of her male and female friends on the other--to persuade her that once she tries...