LE BEAU MARIAGE Movie Review

A Good Marriage
The Well-Made Marriage

More than a decade before Eric Rohmer made Le Beau Mariage, he cast the very young Béatrice Romand in his great Claire's Knee as Laura, a brilliant, precocious child almost frighteningly wise in the ways of romance. But while the earlier film was a tale of erotic obsession fulfilled, Le Beau Mariage finds Romand as Sabine, a 20-something yuppie driven by a decidedly non-erotic agenda: the nailing down of a reasonably adequate male specimen—the first one she can find—to assume the role of immediate husband and future father. Sabine settles on a lawyer and zeros in for the kill, and watching her at work on the guy is both fascinating and depressing. You keep hoping for both of their sakes that she won't succeed, yet one's sense of traditional movie suspense makes you root unconsciously for this misdirected powerhouse to get what she wants. It's a little like the mixed feelings you have seeing the evil Robert Walker's fingers almost touching the incriminating lighter through the grating in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train—you don't want an innocent man convicted of a crime, yet something in you roots for him to reach down just a little bit further to grab his undeserved prize.

NEXT STOP … The Aviator's Wife, Boyfriends & Girlfriends, Claire's Knee

1982 (R) 97m/C FR Beatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle, Andre Dussollier, Feodor Atkine, Pascal Greggory, Sophie Renoir; D: Eric Rohmer; W: Eric Rohmer; C: Bernard Lutic; M: Ronan Girre, Simon des Innocents. Venice Film Festival '82: Best Actress (Romand). VHS NO