One Man's Meat

Sundays and Cybele. People turn and stare at them. No wonder. Pierre (Hardy Kruger) is 30, Cybele (Patricia Gozzi) is twelve. Yet there they go through a pretty little park near Paris, holding hands and mooning. "You'll be 36," she murmurs dreamily, "when I'm 18. He bends and kisses her hair. Tenderly as a mother she holds his head and tells him that he looks like "un enfant perdu. Seductively as a mistress she lies on the soft sward, tells him that something touched her shoulders in a dream--"and I thought it was your lips." His lips quiver.

His eyes veil when he goes home to the young woman he is living with. She is charming and she loves him, but he thinks only of the little girl. When the young woman finds out who her rival is, she is appalled. Her lover is a sick man, a pilot who crashed in Indo-China and has lived in limbo ever since, his memory gone and his imagination prey to fearful fancies.

Will he harm the little girl or is his feeling for her pure? It must be pure. "He's like a child. He's reliving his childhood.

She gives him the world cut down to his size." Nevertheless, one dark night . . .

The French, of course, adored all this, and certainly there is something to be said for such a powerfully perfumed little fleur du mat. It is lovely to look at--Cameraman Henri Decae laves his park and his pond and his wandering darlings in a Proustian pallor of times lost. It is formidably well-played--Kruger finely suggests both Cupid and psycho, and Gozzi is a born actress with big brown eyes and a pretty little finger to wrap fathers around. And it is composed with surprising finesse--Director Serge Bourguignon, who at 31 had never before made a full-length film, makes images as surely as a peacock makes feathers.

Unhappily, like most beginners, Bourguignon tries to do too much at once.

Cybele seems simultaneously intended as a romantic idyl, a secret thrill for naughty little boys of all ages, a modern myth of the mother goddess. The myth declares itself in symbols too insistent--the child is flatly called by the name of the goddess herself; her lover brings her a weathercock, bird of Apollo, god of light; and at the end an evergreen, tree of Dionysus, god of darkness, stands above his corpse.

Furthermore, the idyl and the peepshow are grossly incompatible. Director Bourguignon does not seem to understand that what is infantile is not necessarily childlike and certainly not charming.

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