The Cheaters

Late fifties Paris, around Saint-Germain-des-Prés: the children of well-off families drift from party to party, make a principle of taking nothing seriously, and treat showing feeling as bad manners. Inside this group two of them fall in love and do everything they can not to admit it. The film is not interested in a portrait of youth. It is interested in the price of the pose of indifference: everyone competes to look unbothered, and in the end someone pays for actually not caring. The form is built on the jazz records, night parties and car scenes of the period. Marcel Carné directed. The film sold 4,953,600 tickets in France, making it the most watched domestic release of the year, and won the Grand prix du cinéma français. At the same time its frankness about the sexuality of the young caused a large controversy and it was banned in some regions of France. Jacques Charrier, Pascale Petit and Andréa Parisy lead, with a young Jean-Paul Belmondo in the cast. Who it is for: anyone curious about French youth culture at the end of the fifties and about late Carné. Who it is not for: viewers expecting New Wave freshness. In describing that generation the film still belongs, stylistically, to the older French cinema, and its gaze is moralising in places.