Saint-Tropez Blues (1961)
Directed by Marcel Moussy

Film Review

Saint-Tropez Blues was the first film directed by Marcel Moussy, who had recently fulfilled the commissions for which he is now most famous - co-scripting François Truffaut's first two features, Les 400 coups (1959) and Tirez sur le pianiste (1960).  Moussy made one further film for cinema - Trois hommes sur un cheval (1969) - but he devoted the bulk of his career to French television.  His first film is significant in that it featured Marie Laforêt at the start of her career in her first lead role - prior to this the actress had had a notable supporting role in René Clement's thriller Plein soleil (1960) alongside Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet.

Without Laforêt, this film would probably have little interest.  Her charismatic presence and unrivalled gamine charm, not to mention her vocal talents, at least partly redeem a film that is otherwise pretty well lacking in just about every department.  Saint-Tropez Blues typefies a kind of 'Nouvelle Vague Lite' film that was endemic in France in the early 1960s.  Invariably, these offered the glibbest portraits of self-absorbed, intellectualising youngsters idling away their empty lives, apparently spared the sordid business of having to earn their own living.  Marcel Moussy's film is not the worst example of this unpalatable genre but it hardly passes muster, either as art or entertainment.  The actors playing Moussy's  hoard of insouciant adolescent drifters were obviously selected more for their good looks than any acting ability, and it doesn't take long before Laforêt's co-star Jacques Higelin wears your nerves down to the point that you just want to scream.  Like Laforêt, Higelin found far greater success as a popular singer after this film - and you can see why.

The one treat the film does offer is an unexpected cameo appearance by Claude Chabrol.  His facetious (indeed scary) answers to an interview on his latest film (probably Les Bonnes femmes) inject some badly need humour into the otherwise humourlessly bereft proceedings.  Chabrol's wife and muse Stéphane Audran also appears in the film, alas too briefly to make it worth the watching.  Pierre Lhomme's vibrant colour photography and a relentlessly upbeat jazz soundtrack gives the film the thinnest veneer of modernity, but the dreadful lack of content and surfeit of raw cliché still manage to show through this surface gloss and date the film badly.

Marcel Moussy was 36 when he made this film - hardly one of the 'young Turks'.  Maybe this is why its view of youth culture appears so horrendously superficial, old-fashioned and a tad condescending. Saint-Tropez Blues is a film that tries as hard as it can to appear 'hip' but it just looks like a fake, as unconvincing as an overweight fifty-year-old in Lycra.  A young gigolo's attempt to talk a stubborn virgin into bed is essentially all the film amounts to - the former just wants to notch up another quick conquest, the latter is determined to save herself for her Prince Charming.  The inevitable happens.  All this wouldn't have been bad if some thought had gone into the characterisation, but no, Moussy is happy playing with characters that have the thickness of tissue paper.

Prettily shot it may be, and it does make a decent job of selling the French Riviera (of course, it looks nothing like that now), but Saint-Tropez Blues is as hollow and complacent as a film of this kind can be, with none of the daring and sincerity of comparable films by the 'true' Nouvelle Vague directors and their contemporaries.  It pales into significance compared with, for example, Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's La Fille aux yeux d'or (1961), in which Marie Laforêt also takes the lead role - and does far more with it.

Film Synopsis

Philosophy student Anne-Marie agrees to stay in Paris whilst her parents take their summer holidays in Aix-en-Provence.  She soon regrets her decision and is easily tempted when Jean-Paul, an arts student, offers to drive her in her mother's car to Saint-Tropez.  Keen to get over a love affair that ended badly, Anne-Marie accepts Jean-Paul's proposal and the two are soon heading off to the Riviera for a few idle days in the sun.  On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker, Jacques.   Anne-Marie is still a virgin and has no intention of giving herself to Jean-Paul or Jacques, although she has a harder time resisting the advances of an abstract painter, Trabu, who spends as much time womanising as he does painting.  Jean-Paul appears so obsessed with bedding Anne-Marie that she loses interest in him and goes off with Jacques.  Anne-Marie has a shock when her parents telephone her, having seen her photograph in a magazine.  She agrees to join them in Aix, but first she must bid farewell to Jean-Paul, who has since found work decorating a cellar nightclub.  It is here that she finally finds love...