Sundays and Cybele

I'm not quite sure I've seen a movie like Sundays and Cybele, the winner of the 1962 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Well, it reminds me of some other films. I thought quite a bit about Beautiful Girls, in which Timothy Hutton is enchanted by a 14-year-old Natalie Portman. In this film, a mentally fragile veteran falls in (platonic) love with an 11-year-old girl.

Directed by Serge Bourguignon, it stars Hardy Kruger as a fighter pilot who, upon crash landing in Indochina, thinks he might have killed a young girl. He is recuperating in small apartment, living with a nurse he met in recovery. He likes to spend his time at the railroad station, watching the trains. One day a man and a girl get off, wondering where the convent is. Kruger follows them, and realizes that the man is turning his daughter over to a convent school. He also figures out that the father never intends on returning.

Kruger then passes himself as the father and visits the girl every Sunday. She takes to him immediately, and has a crush on him like only a young girl can, talking about their relationship in adult terms. She fears he will abandon her, and one day when he has to go on a social visit, she is devastated.

The nurse he lives with learns about the girl, but realizes its innocent as she watches them, hidden, frolic in the park. Kruger's friend, a sculptor, also supports the friendship, but even in the more innocent days of 1962, tongues wag, and the ending becomes tragic.

Sundays and Cybele is about two people connecting while society frowns at them. I noted the many different ways Bourguignon uses various modes of perception. The first time we see Kruger it is through a train window, a iris of sorts. Then we see people looking through frosted windows and even a wine glass, which Kruger views his so-called friends. The most stunning example of this is when Kruger is headed toward the convent for the first time, and we see him from a truck and its side mirror. Thus we can see the future as well as the past in the same shot.

Kruger is fine in a part that requires mostly stoicism (Bourguignon wanted Steve McQueen, who was too expensive). Patricia Gozzi is the girl, and she had a brief career following, but she's quite good as Cybele. Incidentally, the French title of the film is Sundays in Ville d'Avray. The girl's name is a secret both to Kruger and the viewer, and we don't find it out until the end of the film. But for some reason the English-language title puts her name right in the title. Go figure.