What an incredible mythology modern culture has constructed around the summer season, which is the season of school vacations, family holidays to the beach, and a momentary pause in our working lives. Somehow, love affairs flame and are extinguished, friendships grow sharper, knowledge and wisdom are attained - all in the space of three fleeting months. It is exactly as Karl Marx defined the alienated man, who can only relax and feel alive in his time away from work.
Occasionally on this blog I take a moment to notice a film that suffers an obscurity that I feel is undeserved. A few weeks ago, while gathering information about the American writer James Salter, I came across a film I was utterly unaware of called simply Three that Salter wrote - based on Irwin Shaw's short story "Then We Were Three" - and directed that is a kind of variation on a theme that he explored in his novel A Sport and a Pastime, namely what used to be called a love triangle, or three dimensions that are resisting the pressure of gravity to become two. The story of Three is remarkably simple: near the end of summer two young American men are wandering together from Italy to France, celebrating the last great days of their youth, when they meet a beautiful girl who agrees to accompany them on condition that she doesn't choose one of them and ruin their friendship. But, of course, she does, and the story ends with the departure of one of the men while his friend and the girl are sleeping - together.
Something of the same conflict appears, albeit in the imagination of the narrator, in Salter's novel, which is often intensely erotic, and suggests a kind of jealous desire that he could be a stand-in for one or the other subjects of his narrative. But whether he is jealous of Dean's intimacy with Anne-Marie or jealous of Anne-Marie's intimacy with Dean is left to the reader to speculate. I knew that Salter had worked as a screenwriter, most notably for Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, but that, according to Wikipedia, he became "disdainful of it" - likely because of his failure to achieve commercial success in the medium.
The "three" in Irwin Shaw's story are Munnie, Bert, and Martha, who become in the film Taylor, Bert, and Marty. It shouldn't have taken much effort for Salter to improve on Shaw's story, which is a straightforward portrait of childhood's last fling before responsibilities are imposed. The film's tagline, which appears on its poster (see attached), is "... but at the same time?" which is a salacious promise that the film doesn't come close to delivering.
In my book report on A Sport and a Pastime, I suggested that, if the book were made into a film, it would be directed by Éric Rohmer. I failed to remember that a quite similar story had already been adapted to film by François Truffaut called Jules and Jim, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. One of the themes explored in the Truffaut film was the threesome - a personal relationship between two people expanded to include a third. As its title suggests, in the case of Jules and Jim the central relationship is the one between two men, a German and a Frenchman. When they meet and become mutually fascinated with a woman named Catherine, their friendship is tested when the woman chooses to sleep with Jules. Despite her marrying Jules, and having his child, Catherine is unhappy and the two friends agree that the solution to the problem would be for Jules and Jim and Catherine to cohabit.
In Three it becomes too obvious which of the two friends will break their pact with Marty and sleep with her. Though he is achingly sincere and at one point Marty even asks him into her room (he demurs for the sake of his friendship with Bert), Taylor is the one who is cheated. 27-year-old Sam Waterston was cast as Taylor, and an Australian singer named Robie Porter, who is actually quite good, was cast as Bert. But whatever interest the film holds today was the casting of 22-year-old Charlotte Rampling (even her name is erotic) as Marty.
Waterston is a shy, and rather forced presence throughout the film. As an actor, he really didn't develop much throughout his long subsequent career. (He was a terrible choice for Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields.) He was 27 during shooting, but looks much younger. He is tall but physically quite unimposing, even when he appears bare-arsed in an attempted sea rescue. Charlotte is eminently sexier, for reasons that are hard to identify. After all these years, the allure of the young Charlotte Rampling is something of a mystery. She made quite a career for herself by appearing in arty Italian films like The Damned and The Night Porter that she improved with her nudity.
Every now and then, Salter shows us, from a distance, Bert and Marty walking or playing together like contented children, while Taylor looks on forlornly. I waited for a spark that would ignite the story, but I waited in vain. Only at the very end does a strong emotion appear, but it's Taylor's dejection and disappointment at Bert and Marty violating the terms of their arrangement. Just after dawn, he stealthily takes his leave of them, asleep together upstairs, and drives the old Peugeot down the tree-lined street. Once the car is safely out of sight, Salter shows Bert and Marty walking to a café table and taking their seats - a duet now instead of a trio.
A word about the cinematography by Etienne Becker, who was the son of the marvelous filmmaker Jacques Becker. He started his career with Chris Marker and Éric Rohmer. He was responsible, just prior to shooting Three, for the haunting imagery of Louis Malle's Phantom India. In Three, we are treated to glimpses of Florence from refreshing angles and scenes shot in the south of France by night and early morning light.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I enjoy directing attention to films whose obscurity is undeserved. Three failed to convince me that it's one of those films. Florence, Antibes and Biarritz are eternally alluring, but the three people chosen to walk around them are not.
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