BEFORE: Audrey Hepburn carries over from "Roman Holiday" -
THE PLOT: A middle-aged playboy is fascinated by the daughter of a private detective who has been hired to entrap him with the wife of a client.
AFTER: One of the factors that I take into an account when I rate a film is this - did I stay awake for the whole film? And if not, how many times did I doze off? I did not make it through this whole film after beginning it in the wee hours of the morning, so I had to watch the last hour on Friday evening. However, I don't think this tells the whole story, because I had to shovel snow TWICE yesterday, and that marked like the 10th day of shoveling this winter - so I'm knackered, man.
The IMDB describes this film as director Billy Wilder's salute to the films of Ernst Lubitch, but I don't think that tells the whole story either. I see the link to early screwball comedies, but with its depiction of free love (more or less) in 1957 Paris, it also seems way ahead of its time. And once again, we're at the corner of romance and deception, so for me, that places the film, stylistically and chronologically, somewhere between "It Happened One Night" and more modern fare, like "Must Love Dogs" or "My Best Friend's Wedding".
In fact, with a lot of visual quirkiness, and a focus on the idle upper class, with a lot of time spent in a particular hotel, it almost seems like this is the sort of film Wes Anderson might make, if he had been around in the late 1950's. How else can I explain a band of Gypsy musicians, wearing full evening tuxes, playing "Fascination" while standing in a steam room? Sure, they're doing it because a rich person is paying them to, but still - it's a visual non sequitur at the very least. (And, why are so many of my films set in hotels lately?)
I'd be inclined to say, "Oh, they just don't make films like they used to." But I can't, because they NEVER made films like this, umm, except for this. Tonight Hepburn plays a young woman who is the daughter of a private detective, and she's spent years reading his case files about people carrying on illicit romances, to the point where that has warped her perceptions about the way that love works. As far as she knows, romance means cheating on your spouse with the ski instructor, or the pool boy, etc. and meeting in a hotel for - dancing, let's go with dancing and then we can discuss what comes later.
So when she overhears her father's latest client's plans to catch his wife in the act of cheating and shoot her playboy lover, she realizes that she knows the time and place of a future crime, and goes there to warn the playboy. (Really, her father and the police should have stepped in to do something, so she's more of a good character than all of them...) After warning the playboy, the cheating woman is allowed to leave, and Hepburn's character masquerades as the playboy's lover - saving a man's life, but also positioning her to be the playboy's next conquest.
I'm not exactly sure what prompts her to deceive the playboy, telling him that she's had many lovers before, when she clearly hasn't. The fact that she has a paramour at music school who shares her interests and is at least in her ballpark, age-wise, proves that she really has no clue what love is. But for some reason she feels the need to act like a player, so she pretends like a casual fling in a hotel is no big deal, because of all of her previous experience.
Another strange thing then starts to happen - the playboy who's had a long string of lovers comes to think that perhaps he's met his match, someone else in 1957 Paris who treats sex as casually as he does. And hearing about all of her (made-up) lovers drives him crazy, makes him insanely jealous. This is a conundrum many people face when in relationships - do they want to know details about their lover's sexual history, or not? Many people act like they do, when they really don't. Or vice versa.
Tying the last three Audrey Hepburn films together, it then becomes about who knows what when - in "Wait After Dark" we saw three men who knew about what was in the doll, when the blind woman didn't, and in "Roman Holiday", we knew that the newsman knew the princess was a princess, when she didn't know that he recognized her. And in "Love in the Afternoon", when the playboy sets out to figure out who the mystery woman really is, will he succeed? Can he learn her identity before jealousy drives him mad, or makes him fall in love?
I'm not crazy about the ending, but then I'm not really crazy about the pairing of a much older actor with a younger actress. I felt that the boyfriend at music school would have been a better match for her, and not just because they were of a similar age - they clearly set up this girl as someone who has a skewed outlook on what love is, and then she never really learned otherwise. It's like if you grew up in a pet shop and someone led you to believe that you'd someday marry a turtle - you'd think that at some point, someone would set you straight and tell you that's not how it's supposed to work.
(EDIT: The IMDB points out in its trivia section that this film may have been unsuccessful because audiences in 1957 also agreed that Gary Cooper was too old to be paired with Audrey Hepburn. A year later, Cooper reportedly looked weird because he'd had an unsuccessful facelift. See, plastic surgery disasters in Hollywood have been around for a while.)
Also starring Gary Cooper (last seen in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town"), Maurice Chevalier (last seen in "Gigi"), John McGiver (last seen in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), Lise Bourdin.
RATING: 5 out of 10 surveillance photos
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