I was particularly taken with Jean Seberg's pre-Breathless performance as a blithely selfish young woman who may resent Deborah Kerr, for "taking away her father-as-playmate" (played as a walking, likable contradiction by David Niven, who brings a blend of diffident, heedless sybaritic blindness to the role). More pointedly, she soon seems to take an active dislike to the woman for making Seberg see herself. Her character darkens throughout the movie, just as the brightness of the coastal light becomes stronger and there is more contrast between the long, dark shadows of the late afternoons as the movie goes on.
Seeing and, fatally, hearing, crop up throughout the movie, with director Otto Preminger using mirrors as objects for Cecile (Seberg) to admire her effects in throughout the movie. Eventually, the images in the mirror go from sunny to drained of all color, as seen below. Cecile is always full of self-regard--not just in a narcissistic way. She must see herself in her various poses as a nymphet, a proto-adult watching Ilsa (Mylène Demongeot, who looked like a '50s version of a Renoir) with her father, a conspirator, and finally, as a faded shadow of something that was bright, guilty and alive once in each of her reflections, in her mind's eye, her mirror, the image in her "third eye" as she plays at yoga (interrupted by Kerr, below), and again, seeing herself very plainly after the summer is over. Jean Seberg, still a teenager, proved she could act in this film.
One of the things I wonder about, though, is the change that occurs when David Niven and Deborah Kerr become engaged. Deborah Kerr's character does begin to display "a touch of the prig", being a bit of a killjoy about Jean Seberg's friskiness, but I kept thinking "Is Kerr behaving this way because, as a well brought up Frenchwoman about to take the plunge into respectability, she really believes it is her duty to discipline her stepdaughter to be?"
I didn't think that Kerr, (who may not have looked this beautiful or warm since her early days with Powell & Pressburger) really felt comfortable in her new role as finacee or as stepmother in training. You can see her go from being starchy to relaxed and back to the "killjoy" in the course of the movie. Niven and Seberg don't really change. They just become more like their true sybaritic, jaded selves over the course of the movie. However, both father and daughter are much more self-aware by the end of the story. They are still unable to change for the better in any way.
Great cinematography by Georges Périnal and I particularly like the contrast between the black and white of the present and the color sequences of memory.
Perhaps one of those who has seen the movie several times can tell me if I understood much of what was going on. Thanks.
