One of my all time favorites.

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"The Lovers" took a while to draw me in. It's about rich, bored people, and rich, bored people are boring. But then things take a turn when the most bored of the bunch, played by Jeanne Moreau, tired of her drippy husband and vapid lover, engages in a night of passion with a stranger she meets by chance and sees a whole new world of possibilities open to her.Louis Malle, the film's director, delivers a master class in tone. The first section of the film is a study in reserved realism. We see Moreau's character going about her days, and not only are we bored by her, we even dislike her air of privilege and spoiled entitlement. But then evening falls and the film becomes a prolonged interlude of romance and lust, and it assumes the ethereal magical quality of a fairy tale. Then daylight breaks again, the spell is broken, but those who were under it venture back out in the world, braver and better equipped to deal with the things about it that brought them down before."The Lovers" is a highly erotic film, and even allowing for its being European, where people are more relaxed about sex and nudity than in America, it's a pretty shocking film for the time in which it was released (1958). While "Gigi" was winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, this film was showing Jeanne Moreau's bare breasts and suggesting oral sex. Not to mention that this affair is being carried on in the same house where the woman's husband and child are asleep. The film feels far ahead of its time, even more for its themes than for any explicit content.Grade: A

This film is the story of a bored wife and mother (Jeanne Moreau). She lives in a lovely manor home filled with servants in the country. However, she is unhappy and her marriage is without passion. She and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms and she is bored with life. For a while, she deals with it by taking frequent trips to Paris--where she takes a lover. Yet, deep down, she's still bored. Then, out of the blue, she meets another man quite by accident--and they spend a night making love in her home--while her husband, lover and best friend sleep.Back in the late 1950s when it was released, this film created quite a furor in the US. Because of its amoral plot involving a married woman having multiple affairs and showing nudity, it was considered obscene by many and eventually made it to the Supreme Court several years later to decide on its decency. In a landmark case, it was not considered indecent and it led the way to more explicit films being shown in the US in subsequent years. When you see it today, however, you'd never suspect any of this, as the film has almost no nudity at all--and if you are seeing it hoping for some sort of cheap thrill, you are bound to be disappointed. I saw one review that said today it would get an R-rating--heck, I could even imagine it receiving a PG-13. Yes, times have really changed.As far as what I thought of the film, it's really a mixed bag for me. While some can look past the moral problems with the film, I couldn't. It wasn't that the sex scene bothered me--but that the main character seemed like a spoiled child. You see her put nothing into her marriage and instead of dealing with life responsibly, she screws around. It's not that she's immoral--it's more like she's amoral--with no compass to guide her or sense of responsibility or regret. And, the way the film is constructed, it appears to condone and possibly encourage these behaviors. It's sad, as the film ends on a happy note--like life will be great with her running off with a man she hardly knows. I predict in real life, in 97% of cases like these, the woman STILL will find herself bored and might eventually realize that much of the problem is within.Now aside from my moralistic views on the film, I cannot simply dismiss the film because I didn't like the characters (and now that I think about it, I didn't like a single one of them). Artistically speaking, the film was quite brilliant. Louis Malle managed to take a threadbare story and stretch it out to 90 minutes without it becoming dull. Great cinematography, music and acting really carried the film. And, I must add that although there is almost no nudity, the sex scene is highly erotic and exceptionally well made. It managed to make adultery SEEM quite beautiful. And, because of this and its importance to US law, it makes for a must-see experience for cinephiles.By the way, on the Criterion disc is an interesting special feature on the US release. While it's just various clips and a bit of text, seeing the posters and lobby cards for the American release was funny--and a bit sad. You'd swear that the film was MEGA-hot and full of hot, steamy sex based on these print ads--which it certainly is NOT. I am sure many seeing the film went home very disappointed.

Les amants or The Lovers is the second feature by Louis Malle and the breakthrough of the famous French actress Jeanne Moreau, who now has worked with such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles. The Lovers is a movie that was ahead of its time, which made it hard for people of 1958 to understand it. For example in my home country, Finland the film was roughly edited and bowdlerized and the American distributor of it got a charge for pornography. It's a very erotic tragedy (or a comedy?) about lovers.Jeanne is living a safe bourgeois life with her husband. They have a big house, a servant and a couple of intellectual friends - to one of whom Jeanne falls in love with. One day when Jeanne is traveling to Paris to have an appointment with her lover, Raoul her car breaks down and a stranger comes and offers a helping hand. Eventually a loving bond starts to build between the stranger and Jeanne - will she leave her husband and lover for this strangers she has fall in love with? Louis Malle brilliantly builds up this ironic tragicomedy; a woman who cheats his husband with another man, whom she's also cheating. The film is full of erotic charge - firstly only on the level of gestures, narrative and expressions. But eventually the charge starts to set free and the subtle quiet sexuality turns into "sinful perversion". The imagery we see in The Lovers isn't harsh and it's very hard for us to believe that some people have actually seen it as pornography. But when one looks at the history of cinema and especially the sexuality in cinema - Louis Malle took a huge step. Europeans were light years ahead of Americans in this; De Sica, Bergman, Nouvelle Vague etc.Sexuality on the screen has always interested me as it has film fanatics, critics, researchers and historians. Today David Lynch can be seen as one of the biggest developers of it. The way how The Lovers goes from a subtle, elegant sexuality to a wild primitive sexuality is gorgeous and the reason behind it makes the change seem even bigger. First Jeanne is living a relationship of Loveless love, she changes to another man, but still cannot find true love love. Because both of the men are living the same lie with her, the illusion, the bourgeois life. When she meets a working class man and starts this scary, wild, but loving affair she is able to find true love.

What you see here is Jeanne Moreau's famous first filmic female orgasm and director Louis Malle's second feature film. Les amants / The Lovers was at that time a controversial study of bourgeois emptiness and sexual yearnings. The (as widely described) inscrutable Moreau plays a high society wife who is bored by her rich husband, has a lover, smart friends and a daughter. On one night she makes passionate love with a young student of a few hours acquaintance, and leaves it all for a new life.If it now looks too much like an angry young sensualist's movie, the combination of a body language that is highly pleasurable, the soundtrack of Brahms, and the Henri Decaë's velvety monochrome, ravishing photography proves hard to resist. Her second collaboration with director Malle shows once more, what a wonderful screen persona Moreau is: commanding, willful, sultry.