Youth

From top: Jules and Jim, Bay of Angels and Chloe

Some thoughts following a few films watched this month. The inconvenient truth, especially for women, is that youth matters very much indeed.

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In Jules and Jim, Jeanne Moreau plays a young and attractive, impulsive if not random woman who spends her lifetime hopping from man to man. So skilled is she at playing the game of romance that she manages to have her husband almost begging his best friend to go after her when their marriage breaks down, so that she would be close by - the husband cannot bear to have her walk out of his life. Hence the incredible threesome in the house. The light touch of the film only emphasizes the fragility and ridicule of relationships. It reminds me of Gloomy Sunday, a film on an incredulous consensual threesome set in Nazi Budapest.

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Contrast Bay of Angels, in which Jeanne Moreau is a hopelessly addicted gambler, a woman with a history; to her youth is a thing of the past. And while the character appears in the film in style, and Jeanne Moreau plays the role beautifully, one cannot help feeling sorry for the fatigue with life felt by a woman of her age. In Jules and Jim, you can smell the freedom and abundance of time that come with youth. It therefore comes as a surprise that Bay of Angels was only made a year after Jules and Jim - yet the same actress acted twenty years older.

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Chloe is about seduction, suspicion and infidelity. Julianne Moore plays the wife who suspects her charismatic professor husband Liam Neeson has an affair with his student. She hires a girl half of her age (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce her husband to test his fidelity, but which all turn out to be a mistake. A scene still strikes me: when Julianne Moore confesses to her husband the scheme of seduction, she collapses and reveals how insecure she feels every day when she looks into the mirror and sees herself getting old - she "does not know how to seduce him anymore". I stirred. I imagined myself listening to that line say ten or twenty years later weeping.

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The conundrum is that by the time we gain the wisdom to treasure youth, youth has passed. By definition, youth is when one has the luxury not to treasure anything at all.