The greatest movie ever made..!

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Absolutely the worst movie.

A Brilliant Conflict

Pierre, a soldier traumatised in Indochina for killing a child, lives in ghost-like existence. Amnesic, detached and distracted, he spends his days at a train station waiting for his love, Madeleine, to come from work. One day he meets a lonely girl interned in a school and plots an ingenious plan to get her to see every Sunday, by pretending to be her father come to take her out. These two figures, abandoned as they are, are perfect for each other.Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele is one of those intimate dramas built on almost nothing, so simple and straightforward it is. The movie focuses almost exclusively on Pierre and Cybele, their strolls to the park, and the emotional relief she gives him.The black-and-white cinematography complements the story perfectly, since Pierre's world is also one of dualisms: life and death, adult corruption and youthful innocence, honesty with Cybele and deception with everyone else.Hardy Kruger plays Pierre with feeling, looking like a man who lives lost in a world he's cut off from. He has trouble communicating his ideas and expresses himself with facial expressions and his clumsy body movements. Patricia Gozzi plays the 12-year-old Cybele and I wonder why she didn't triumph in film: at a tender age she showed more talent than many adult actors.Melancholy, serene and introspective, Sundays and Cybele is a drama not to be missed by anyone who enjoys quiet movies built on powerful relationships.

It's taken me a long time to catch up with this outstanding film but it was well worth the wait and I am further indebted - if that is possible - to my good friend in France for making this available to me. The theme of two wounded birds attempting to heal each other is far from new, the theme of adult and child bonding whether sexual or otherwise is, if anything, even older so this movie had a lot to beat and to say it does so hands down is to underrate it. The phrase 'adult and child' evokes anything from Lolita to Le Papillon and everything in between but nothing comes even close to this uniquely beautiful film that is reminiscent in its complex simplicity of Au Hasard, Balthazar and equally unforgettable. The two leads are absolutely SUPERB - and Hardy Kruger is the last person I thought I'd ever say that about - and completely dominate the support, fine though it is. One of its strengths is the way in which Writing, Directing and Acting surmount easily the main stumbling blocks of coincidence and outrageous fortune; consider, what are the chances that one wounded bird (Kruger) would encounter another (Pozzi) at Exactly the right time for both their psyches to respond to the healing elixir in the other or, for that matter, that a father would more or less cheerfully abandon a daughter without either a second thought or a plausible reason and that a second man bearing no resemblance to the biological father would not face even the most basic interrogation when turning up, claiming to be the father, and be allowed to remove her from the care of the nuns Sunday after Sunday. Perhaps paedophilia was just a word in 1964 but whatever the Artists involved in this film, as I have already stated, make us completely forget practicalities/realism and draw us inexorably into THEIR world where the tragic end is equally inexorable. I cannot speak too highly of this magnificent film which I will watch again and again.

Just remembered the title: "Sunday and Cybel".This film had a major haunting impact upon my life.(Boston 1962)What a beautiful story and "Sunday and Cybel" needs to be preserved on DVD.The childlike trust, and human bond that develops between two "wounded human beings" without a hint of inappropriate sexuality, needs to be seen again and again.I was deeply pleased, that others have found this film as lovely as I did. It warms my heart to see others recognize such tender humanity between a child and an adult."David and Lisa" has a similar sense of love between damaged Souls, out of darkness into the light of emotional "healing".Being a family psychotherapist, only restores my faith in the psyche to find love in a cruel world of distrusting authorities who only know how to kill flies with hammers, and destroy people they do not understand.Bravo to the perfect cast, direct and writers, with brilliant cinematographer, to enrich the story into a rare masterpiece. VSS

This film is first and foremost beautiful. The beauty of the B&W cinematography is appalling. The composition is perfect. The delicate range of grays achieve a silky texture that has an almost tactile feeling. The music by Jarré is beautiful. The child actress Patricia Gozzi is nothing but angelical in her blooming beauty.The story is simple; a former war pilot with war trauma and amnesia and an abandoned little girl meet by chance and desperately cling to each other so as to find company and salvation. The child becomes the more mature of the couple, the adult goes along innocently and follows her counsel, advancing inexorably to his own destruction. The well intended (well, more or less well intended) adult world does not understand the delicate platonic relation, reads it as sinful and deviant, and proceeds to destroy it. The final scene is one of the most painful and desolate in the history of cinema, even though its beauty is unforgettable.The weakness of the movie is that it has not survived well the end of the sixties. Its aesthetics is too connected to the conventions of the time. The human relations are not real enough for our time. There is a degree of rigidity, idealization and oversimplification that does not allow the film to stay alive, as is the case with the masterpieces of Fellini and Bergman. However, this does not detract the movie from its serene beauty, its evocative power, and all the nostalgic pain of a lost love.