Goodbye Again

Paula is an interior designer in Paris; in her forties, with her own business and her own life. She has been with Roger for five years. He loves her and also sees other women without hiding it, and she appears to have accepted that. Then she meets the son of a client: Philip is twenty five, a lawyer, and falls in love with her outright. Paula does not take it seriously at first. Anatole Litvak directs. Ingrid Bergman plays Paula, Yves Montand plays Roger and Anthony Perkins plays Philip. The source is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Anthony Perkins won best actor at the Cannes film festival in 1961 for the part. It comes directly after Psycho and stands deliberately opposite to it. The subject is not the difference in age but Paula having to decide which relationship will diminish her less. The film makes neither of them easy. The reference to Brahms in the title comes from the novel and the music is used inside the narrative. Litvak gives Paris not as a place for tourists but as a city that is worked and lived in; the locations are real. Its limit is the pace; it runs past two hours and the meetings repeat in the middle. Who it is for: viewers who like the European based American productions of the sixties and Ingrid Bergman. Who it is not for: it is slow, it rests on talk, and the ending is emotionally hard but without surprise.