Max mon amour (1986)
Directed by Nagisa Ôshima

Film Review

Just when you thought French cinema couldn't possibly get any weirder here we are with Charlotte Rampling throwing in her all in a light-hearted sex romp with a chimpanzee. It sounds like the premise for a bad Monty Python sketch but somehow the acclaimed Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima takes it and uses it as the basis for quite a classy satire on bourgeois life. After all, why shouldn't a ravishingly beautiful woman in her early forties fall head over heels in love with a hairy primate - isn't this just the kind of thing that happens in virtually every other French movie?

If the film were made today, Max would no doubt be a superbly convincing digital special effect. Alas, back in the mid-1980s such technology was a long way off and so we have to suspend disbelief and try not to laugh when a female dancer in a monkey suit (Ailsa Berk) appears on the screen and does a not entirely convincing impersonation of a chimpanzee. Good taste and the strong likelihood of heavyhanded censorship prevent anything involving explicit inter-species coupling from being shown on screen, so the film is less a pervy shocker and more a mildly provocative comedy of manners along the lines of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), a film which it sometimes seems to be a vague parody of. Charlotte Rampling is probably the only actress on the planet who could convince us that her soulmate is a chimp, and far from being perverse, there's something quaintly endearing about her simian love affair. Why shouldn't a woman's best friend be a pint-size ape?

Film Synopsis

Suspecting that his wife, Margaret, is having a secret love affair, Peter Jones, a British ambassador in Paris, engages a private detective to investigate.  The truth is more than he can bear: for the past year, his wife has been having an affair with a circus chimpanzee.  Not sure how to deal with the situation, Peter persuades Margaret to let the chimp stay with them in their chic Parisian apartment...