la maison sous les arbres (d. rené clément,, w. sidney buchman, eleanor perry, arthur cavanaugh)

A star vehicle for Faye Dunaway, this is a curious mash-up of US actors in Paris stuck in a ludicrous plot. The setting lends a glamorous quality to a narrative in which a shadowy, very seventies, ‘organisation’ is controlling Dunaway’s husband, for reasons that are never particularly clear. In general the film seems to have been set up to permit Dunaway a few set-piece scenes. You can’t help but laugh when she has to make a getaway from her neighbour’s flat in a nightie and the neighbour hands her some thigh length red leather boots and an exotic coat, which just happen to be on-hand. In a similar vein, the film opens, with a hint of Atalante, with a long sequence of Dunaway drifting through Paris’ canals looking moody on a barge. As such it becomes an intriguing study of how the star system both permits and limits the making of movies, in France as in the USA.