Beautiful People in European Villas: a Film Genre of Its Own

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/t-magazine/european-villa-films.html

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To many of its admirers, Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name” (which won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay) is a perfect summer idyll of a movie. In the course of six or so sun-dappled weeks “somewhere in northern Italy,” a teenage boy named Elio explores his awakening sexuality, having sex with a girl around his own age, a somewhat older man and a perfectly ripe peach. The romance is enabled by the real estate: a vast, ramshackle stone house where Elio spends school vacations with his intellectual parents, eating leisurely meals on the terrace, surrounded by fruit trees and listening to his Walkman (it’s 1983).

The setting is also what defines the film’s genre. It’s a Mediterranean villa movie, a cinematic species that is something of a Guadagnino specialty. His previous feature, “A Bigger Splash” (2016), starred Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes as former lovers reunited on the Italian island of Pantelleria, and was a remake of “La Piscine,” a 1969 thriller in a villa with Alain Delon. In both versions, there is plenty of sex and sexual innuendo, but everything is far from peachy. A dead body winds up in the swimming pool. There is also a dead body in “Swimming Pool” (2003), Francois Ozon’s variation on the theme, in which Charlotte Rampling plays a frustrated novelist, Ludivine Sagnier plays a mysterious young woman and the villa is in the Luberon region of southern France.

These examples suggest that “Call Me by Your Name,” in which nobody gets killed and only feelings are hurt, is something of an anomaly. The norm is, if not outright murder (though there is a fair amount of that) then at least a serious sense of darkness, a sinister, cynical shadow falling over the general atmosphere of half-naked hedonism. In Otto Preminger’s “Bonjour Tristesse” (1958), one of the founding texts of modern villa cinema, Deborah Kerr’s car plunges from the corniche road outside St.-Tropez onto the rocks below, a grisly denouement to a few weeks of scheming, deceit and erotic psychodrama. Brigitte Bardot meets a similar fate in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), filmed partly at the Villa Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri. In “L’Année des Méduses” (1984), a fairly cheesy specimen of the genre, a similar (though far tawdrier and more explicit) season of naughtiness culminates in jellyfish-assisted homicide. In Claude Chabrol’s “Les Biches” (1968), a love triangle ends in a fatal stabbing. In “La Collectionneuse” (1967), one of Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, the violence is limited to a smashed vase and a slapped face, but the atmosphere of sexual intrigue and emotional complication is equally intense.

And so on. It’s not an accident that Richard Linklater, a serious student of European film history, set “Before Midnight” (2013), the last and saddest chapter of his “Before” trilogy, in a sunny Greek vacation spot, where Celine and Jesse, nearly 20 years after their first Eurail-pass adventure in 1995, engage in al fresco dining and philosophical discussion and then confront the possible death of their love and their own encroaching mortality. Vacation, Linklater suggests, is not for the faint of heart.

Which partly accounts for the durable appeal of these movies. Many of us prefer to observe good-looking people in beautiful places if there’s a degree of misery involved. That’s only natural, but it’s not simply the presumed jealousy of the audience that mandates moral drama and mortal danger as condiments to luxurious leisure. These strike the palate as distinctive regional flavors, like wild thyme or fennel pollen, as hallmarks of not-for-tourist European authenticity. While the villa thriller isn’t always tied to a specific location — examples can be found in Greece and Spain, around the Bay of Naples and in the hills of Tuscany — it does have a birthplace, St.-Tropez, to which it returns like a migratory bird. Cinematic visitors to that charming spot, the filmmakers and their characters, take themselves and their pleasures very seriously. Their pursuit of fun is complicated. Meals are prepared and consumed according to a delicate politique. Sunbathing is a philosophical pursuit. “On se baigne?” — shall we go for a swim? — is properly understood as an existential question.

St.-Tropez, named for an early Christian martyr from Pisa, perches at the edge of a peninsula on France’s long southern coast, roughly halfway between Nice and Marseilles. Like many of the towns that dot this stretch of shoreline, its dominant features are a medieval old quarter surmounted by an hulking stone citadel and a harbor crammed with luxury yachts. It has been a long time since anyone could use the phrase “quiet fishing village” to describe this playground of wealth and celebrity, but that quaint legacy is part of its legend. Through good looks and good luck, this village transformed itself into a synonym for glamour, a favored destination for movie stars and a movie star in its own right.

The opening scene of Vadim’s “And God Created Woman,” released in France in 1956 and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency in the United States a year later, features Brigitte Bardot’s unclothed body, tantalizingly framed in CinemaScope and teasingly concealed by a sheet drying on an outdoor clothesline. Her natural beauty is not so much upstaged as complemented by the gorgeousness of St.-Tropez itself, which lolls across the hills behind her, caressed by impossibly blue water and gentle wind. “The scenery is nice,” Bosley Crowther commented in his New York Times review. “And the outstanding feature of the scenery is invariably Mlle. Bardot.”

The juxtaposition of landscape and physique is hardly original, but “And God Created Woman” nonetheless represents a watershed in the cinematic history of sex, sunshine and a certain image of France. It also represents the birth of a distinct microgenre. The kind of movie about idle hedonists getting up to all kinds — really, to a few specific kinds — of naughty, often lethal mischief, the variant of psycho-erotic mystery you might call Côte d’Azur noir, or Hitchcock au vin, or Roséxploitation.

“And God Created Woman” is not quite — not yet — that kind of film. Its principal characters are not jaded sybarites sunning themselves on the decks of pleasure boats or beside hilltop swimming pools, but rather salt-of-the-earth Frenchmen and women with roots in the populist cinema of the 1930s. Bardot plays Juliette, an 18-year-old orphan who works in a bookstore and scandalizes her hardworking foster mother with her willful, wanton ways. Juliette’s major love interests — two of them, anyway — are brothers whose family owns a modest boatyard.

Still, the movie is a premonition of things to come. The boatyard is not long for the waterfront. Monsieur Carradine, a suave real estate developer and Juliette’s would-be sugar daddy, wants to buy the brothers’ property to make room for a new casino. He is a cynical schemer, but not quite a villain, since his scheming is what enables the regular folk — that is, the ascending movie stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and B.B. herself — to get rich and get laid. It will also make their hometown famous.

As his camera follows Juliette, Vadim almost incidentally articulates what will become standard elements of the St.-Tropez art-film plot: a romantic triangle (though the geometry is more complicated than that) leading toward a climactic burst of violence. A fairly mild burst in this case. A pistol is fired and a face is slapped, but nobody is grievously wounded, and the spectacle ends in laughter rather than tears.

“And God Created Woman” established Vadim as a pop auteur (he would go on to marry Jane Fonda and direct her in “Barbarella”) and Bardot as a global phenomenon. St.-Tropez too. Shortly before production started, a local baker created a confection that would become B.B.’s carbohydrate analog. A disc of brioche split, filled with pastry cream and decorated with faux diamonds of crystallized sugar, the Tarte Tropézienne was blond, voluptuous and perfectly balanced between elegance and vulgarity. The actress professed to adore the cake, according to legend, and they synergized each other’s appeal, remaining emblems of the town ever since.

Shortly after Bardot and Vadim left, Otto Preminger showed up with Jean Seberg, David Niven and the rights to a French best seller, Françoise Sagan’s “Bonjour Tristesse,” which would become one of the few Hollywood specimens of St.-Tropez cinema. Niven is a playboy with a waterfront villa and a string of female companions, the most devoted of whom is his daughter, played by Seberg in the role that established her, at 19, as a star and a sex symbol. The fact that one leg of the film’s emotional triangle is a father-daughter relationship makes “Bonjour Tristesse” feel at once wholesome and creepy, and its approach to sexuality remains an intriguing blend of late-studio-era Hollywood discretion and European candor. The sex is mostly implied and deniable, but the tragic twist — a fatal, possibly suicidal car crash on one of the region’s treacherous switchback roads — strikes an effective note of cynicism and cruelty amid the amorous, sun-kissed high jinks. The title promises both an antidote to hedonism and a particular form of pleasure. In those films, doing nothing seems to require serious effort. Shallowness has rarely looked so demanding.

Actual French people may go to the Côte d’Azur for sand, surf and oysters and rosé at beachside restaurants. Americans travel to France for cheese, old churches and picturesque landscapes. But some of us are drawn to more esoteric delights, to the grand abstractions that hover in the Mediterranean air. Ennui. Tristesse. Amour. The villa film puts those at our fingertips and before our eyes, embodied in exquisite topographical and physical forms, and offers us fantasies that seem both accessible and impossible. Those people are in their way perfectly ordinary, and it’s not that hard to project oneself into their chic espadrilles. Their villas are, for the most part, borrowed or rented; their leisure is not a noble privilege but an entitlement granted by the French republic. You could go there. Reader: I went there.

But nobody was seduced, betrayed or killed. I can report that St.-Tropez in real life is lovely, and it’s easy to find the beaches and hamlets where the movies were shot. The version in those movies is better, though, because they edit out the modern blemishes — the Burger King and the paintball course on the road into town, the luxury boutiques near the old outdoor market — and, more, because it dreams up an underside, a penalty, a set of moral and emotional risks clinging to the easy delights like sea snails on the rocks.

We might as well admit it: Fun is pretty dull stuff. Do you want to look at pictures of my trip? Of course you don’t. Ennui, on the other hand, is sexy and intriguing, at least if it involves Brigitte Bardot or Alain Delon. The languorous hours under the Mediterranean sun cast a dark spell; the roads are treacherous and the rocks are sharp. The pursuit of pleasure ends in punishment, an outcome that satisfies both our judgmental and our masochistic urges. These idle, gorgeous specters on the screen get what they deserve, which is exactly what we would want if we found ourselves in their place.