How far would you go to seduce a handsome young priest?
Particularly, if you were a handsome young woman who in open defiance to society married a Jew in pre-wartime France, had a child, and were openly atheistic and communist and bisexual after being widowed?
This is Jean-Pierre Melville's movie, adapted from Béatrix Beck's eponymous novel, and who is far better known for making steely cold-blooded French film-noirs than such melodrama.
It's filmed in quite an old school way for its time (while his contemporaries were blazing new cinematic heights.) It borrows quite heavily from Max Ophüls' Le Plaisir but it's charged with erotic lightning from start to finish - Will she? Will he? Will he? Will she? Will he? Will he? Will he?
There's a lot of she's but only one he but that's still a lot of couplings.
It's old school. Slow as all out. Works via suggestion and a slow piecing together of data than actually showing you the facts.
And it's actually a film noir in a perverted sense of the word.
Is the soul incorruptible? Even in the metaphoric sense of the soul since there is clearly no such thing? To what lengths will you go to get what you want? Will you destroy what you desire to get it just once?
As for the central question, will he or won't he, to even suggest the answer would simply take the piss out of the whole thing, wouldn't it?
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