Lack of good storyline.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I mostly enjoyed this film a lot. Certainly it's camera movement and use of deep focus is exemplary. Interestingly, it is only the focal point of the narrative that I found disappointing and over-played. The use of Brahms here strikes me as heavy handed as the use of Satie in Malle's soon-following The Fire Within seemed natural and complimentary. Most scenes struck me as subtly satiric, and I wondered if it wasn't something of an inspiration for The Graduate.

The bored and empty upper-class Jeanne Tournier (Jeanne Moreau) lives in a manor with many servants in the countryside of Dijon with her husband Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny) and their daughter Catherine. Henri is the editor of The Burgundy Monitor and has been married to Jeanne for eight years, but he does not give much attention to his wife. Jeanne travels frequently to the house of her childhood friend Maggy Thiebaut-Leroy (Judith Magre) in Paris to meet her lover, the famous polo player Raoul Flores (José Villalonga). One day, Henri suspects of the frequent trips of Jeanne to Paris and invites Maggy and Raoul Flores to have dinner and spend the weekend in his mansion. While driving back home from Paris, Jeanne car breaks down and the archaeologist Bernard Dubois-Lambert (Jean-Marc Bory) that is going to Montbard to visit a professor, gives a ride to Jeanne. Henri invites Bernard to stay with them and during the night, he has a love affair with Jeanne. On the next morning, Jeanne decides to go away from Henri, Catherine and Raoul with her new lover. "Les Amants" is the second film of Louis Malle and I can imagine the impact of this amoral story in 1958, with a mother leaving her daughter to seek true love with her younger lover. The muse of many filmmakers Jeanne Moreau is gorgeous and sensual in the role of a woman ahead her time needy for love and happiness. The cinematography in black and white is wonderful and the open conclusion fits perfectly to this sensual film. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Os Amantes" ("The Lovers")

Les amants or The Lovers is the second feature by Louis Malle and the breakthrough of the famous French actress Jeanne Moreau, who now has worked with such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles. The Lovers is a movie that was ahead of its time, which made it hard for people of 1958 to understand it. For example in my home country, Finland the film was roughly edited and bowdlerized and the American distributor of it got a charge for pornography. It's a very erotic tragedy (or a comedy?) about lovers.Jeanne is living a safe bourgeois life with her husband. They have a big house, a servant and a couple of intellectual friends - to one of whom Jeanne falls in love with. One day when Jeanne is traveling to Paris to have an appointment with her lover, Raoul her car breaks down and a stranger comes and offers a helping hand. Eventually a loving bond starts to build between the stranger and Jeanne - will she leave her husband and lover for this strangers she has fall in love with? Louis Malle brilliantly builds up this ironic tragicomedy; a woman who cheats his husband with another man, whom she's also cheating. The film is full of erotic charge - firstly only on the level of gestures, narrative and expressions. But eventually the charge starts to set free and the subtle quiet sexuality turns into "sinful perversion". The imagery we see in The Lovers isn't harsh and it's very hard for us to believe that some people have actually seen it as pornography. But when one looks at the history of cinema and especially the sexuality in cinema - Louis Malle took a huge step. Europeans were light years ahead of Americans in this; De Sica, Bergman, Nouvelle Vague etc.Sexuality on the screen has always interested me as it has film fanatics, critics, researchers and historians. Today David Lynch can be seen as one of the biggest developers of it. The way how The Lovers goes from a subtle, elegant sexuality to a wild primitive sexuality is gorgeous and the reason behind it makes the change seem even bigger. First Jeanne is living a relationship of Loveless love, she changes to another man, but still cannot find true love love. Because both of the men are living the same lie with her, the illusion, the bourgeois life. When she meets a working class man and starts this scary, wild, but loving affair she is able to find true love.

This represents yet another nail in the coffin of the new wavelet; released in 1958 it features everything the spoiled brats were rebelling against and as if that weren't enough it was shot by Henri Decae, who they liked to claim as their own, proving here that at heart he was light years away from their hand-held arrogance. Nice, too, to see Alain Cuny who seemed to disappear - at least from International screens - after Les Visiteurs du soir as the boring (to his wife) semi aristocrat owner of both a newspaper and a château, neither of which does much to scratch the itch afflicting his wife, Jeanne Moreau, which even the attentions of a polo-playing lover cannot assuage. There's some nice observations of the Old-Money set in their natural habitat, ravishing black and white photography and a set piece in a nocturnal wood that is the very antithesis of new wavelet novelty. It was the second time hand-running that Moreau had played an adulterous wife for Malle and if anything she was better this time around. Now it's available in a boxed set of Malle it may attract the attention it deserves.