Viva Maria!
Picture: B-
Sound: C+ Extras: D Film: B-
Bringing together Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau is
enough of a winning combination, but having Louis Malle direct them is even
better. The two play women with the
same name in Viva Maria!, a 1965 film that gave Bardot more credibility
as she went from the softcore silly sex comedies that relied totally on her
beauty, to high profile film of merit like Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt
(1963, reviewed elsewhere on this site).
For Moreau, whose association with François Truffaut put her on the map
and would continue to, it was a chance to expand her horizons into something
more explicitly comic.
Bardot is the daughter of Irish revolutionaries fighting
The British Empire, as the film opens with a montage of comic terrorist attacks
(yes, you read that right) that set up the tone and premise of the film. Escaping capture, she meets the other Maria
(Moreau); a stage performer who has met and entertained the very British elite
who supports the fighters Maria #1 has been against since a child. With her amazing beauty the equal of
performer Maria, she joins her and they immediately invent the striptease!
Well, that might be pushing it Forrest Gump-style, and the
film never takes such severe liberties with history, but the idea of having the
two women in a film is appealing, even when it does not go as far as one might
hope for. Two female leads were rare at
the time, and still does not happen much now.
The Bette Davis/Joan Crawford hit Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
(1962) made this more commercially viable, as the majority of previous female
lead pairing were for sappy, melodramatic “women’s films” that were precursors
to today’s soap operas. This was not
one of those films, especially with the subplots about rebels and
bombings. George Hamilton guest stars
as Moreau’s love interest.
The anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is a pleasant
surprise, looking nice, clear and colorful for its age. Shot in Panavision by Henri Decaë, this is a
good-looking film that will look good upon playback. The full scope frame is used wisely and with some fine shots and
composition, all in EastmanColor that holds up more often than not. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is good, though
too bad this was not stereophonic like many scope films of the time. Georges Delerue did the music score and it
fits very nicely into the plot, which changes tone often. The only extra is the trailer, which shows
its age, but is amusing. Then so is
this film. Critics generally dismissed Viva
Maria! for not being some French New Wave masterwork of some sort, but it
is an amusing comedy with some merit and intelligence. Many films at the time from Europe were
becoming overproduced junk that was the total opposite of what their countries
of origin had produced after World War II.
Malle offered enough to make the difference.
- Nicholas Sheffo
