''Circle of Love'' (french: La ronde) is a 1964 French
drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...
film directed by
Roger Vadim
Roger Vadim Plemiannikov (; 26 January 1928 – 11 February 2000) was a French screenwriter, film director and producer, as well as an author, artist and occasional actor. His best-known works are visually lavish films with erotic qualities, su ...
and based on
Arthur Schnitzler
Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 – 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist.
Biography
Arthur Schnitzler was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire (as of 1867, part of the dual monarchy ...
's 1897 play ''
Reigen''. The film generated minor controversy because of
Jane Fonda
Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress, activist, and former fashion model. Recognized as a film icon, Fonda is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, sev ...
's
nude scene
In film, nudity may be either graphic or suggestive, such as when a person appears to be naked but is covered by a sheet. Since the birth of film, depictions of any form of sexuality have been controversial, and in the case of most nude scene ...
, the first by a major American actress in a foreign film.
Synopsis
In 1913, a sentimental Parisian prostitute offers herself freely to Georges, a handsome soldier, because he resembles her true love. Seeking to take advantage of all opportunities for lovemaking, the soldier seduces Rose, a lonely housemaid, and then goes off to make other conquests.
Returning home, Rose allows her employer's son Alfred to make love to her. Encouraged by the experience, the young gentleman next makes love to Sophie, a married woman. Refreshed by the encounter, Sophie makes bold overtures to her stuffy husband Henri. Later, Henri takes a mistress who forsakes him for an author whom she hopes will write a play for her. Instead, he pursues Maximilienne de Poussy, an established actress with whom he had had an affair years before. He has little success, however, for the actress finds satisfaction only with young men, and she has a brief affair with the count, a young officer.
Following their encounter, the count embarks on a night of wild revelry. In the morning, he is in the sentimental prostitute's apartment, who this time collects a fee for her services, and the cycle of love is now complete.
Cast
*
Marie Dubois
Marie Dubois (born Claudine Lucie Pauline Huzé; 12 January 1937 – 15 October 2014) was a Parisian-born French actress.
Career
She studied at l'École de la rue Blanche (ENSATT) and made her film debut in 1959, first gaining notice the next ...
as La fille / Die Dirne – the prostitute
*
Claude Giraud
Claude Pierre Edmond Giraud (; 5 February 1936 in Chamalières – 3 November 2020) was a French actor.
Career
Claude Giraud studied with Tania Balachova at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier; Berthe Bovy and Jean Meyer at the École de la rue Bla ...
as Georges / Der Soldat – the soldier
*
Anna Karina
Anna Karina (born Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer; September 22, 1940 – December 14, 2019) as Rose / Das Stubenmädchen – the maid
*
Jean-Claude Brialy
Jean-Claude Brialy (30 March 1933 – 30 May 2007) was a French actor and film director.
Early life
Brialy was born in Aumale (now Sour El-Ghozlane), French Algeria, where his father was stationed with the French Army. Brialy moved to mainland ...
as Alfred / Der 'Junge Herr' – the young man
*
Jane Fonda
Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress, activist, and former fashion model. Recognized as a film icon, Fonda is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, sev ...
as Sophie / Die 'Junge Frau' – the wife
*
Maurice Ronet
Maurice Ronet (13 April 1927 – 14 March 1983) was a French film actor, director, and writer.
Early life
Maurice Ronet was born Maurice Julien Marie Robinet in Nice, Alpes Maritimes. He was the only child of professional stage actors Émile Rob ...
as Henri / Der Ehemann – the husband
*
Catherine Spaak
Catherine Spaak (3 April 1945 – 17 April 2022) was a French-born Italian actress and singer who acted in mostly in Italian films with some Hollywood and international productions. She is best known for her roles in the films ''Il Sorpasso'' (1 ...
as La midinette / Das 'Süße Mädel' – the
midinette
*
Bernard Noël
Bernard Noël (19 November 1930 – 13 April 2021) was a French writer and poet. He received the ''Grand Prix national de la poésie'' (National Grand Prize of Poetry) in 1992 and the ''Prix Robert Ganzo'' (Robert Ganzo Prize) in 2010.
Biography ...
(
fr) as L'auteur / Der Dichter – the author
*
Francine Bergé
Francine Bergé (born 21 July 1938, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions a ...
as Maximilienne de Poussy / Die Schauspielerin – the actress
*
Jean Sorel
Jean Sorel (; born 25 September 1934) is a French actor.
Born Jean Bernard de Chieusses de Combaud de Roquebrune, he worked extensively in European cinema during the 1960s and 1970s with directors such as Luis Buñuel and Luchino Visconti. How ...
as Le comte / Der Graf – the young officer
*
Denise Benoît
Denise Benoît (10 September 1919 – 29 May 1973) was a French actress and singer, active across a wide range of genres on the stage, radio and television. Other members of her family were musicians.
Life and career
From a musical family, Benoà ...
as Yvette Guilbert
Production
After having recently directed the box-office hit ''
Les liaisons dangereuses
''Les Liaisons dangereuses'' (; English: ''Dangerous Liaisons'') is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782.
It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and ...
'', Vadim took on another adaptation of a classic erotic text that became ''La ronde''. As Vadim later said:
When I make a picture about relations between people, something erotic comes through; I can't help it! But sex has been an inspiration, the greatest inspiration, since art exists. I don't mean pornography. But when I do something I like to go to the end with what I express. It is very difficult in France to talk about anything but sex! Politics, the army, the police, Catholicism - in that order. There is the influence of priests in censorship; no rule forbids you to discuss the church but they will stop you somehow.
During filming, Jane Fonda began a romantic relationship with Vadim that continued for several years.
Catherine Spaak
Catherine Spaak (3 April 1945 – 17 April 2022) was a French-born Italian actress and singer who acted in mostly in Italian films with some Hollywood and international productions. She is best known for her roles in the films ''Il Sorpasso'' (1 ...
later claimed that Vadim was so focused on Fonda during the making of the film that "everyone suffered."
Reception
The film was released in the United States as a dubbed version that Vadim loathed; this inspired him to make his next film, ''
The Game Is Over
''The Game Is Over'' (original title ''La Curée'', "The Kill") is a 1966 French-Italian French language drama film directed by Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda, Michel Piccoli and Peter McEnery. The film is a modern-day adaptation of the 1871 ...
'', in both English and French versions.
One French reviewer said that Jane Fonda had a "French accent a la
Laurel et Hardy."
[Jane Fonda Is Fracturing 'Em in Paris. By Dorothy Kilgallen. The Washington Post and Times-Herald ashington, D.C1 November 1964: G6.]
''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' praised the film's color and production values but added "there is a vulgarity about Vadim's frequent fleshy close ups which compares sadly... with Ophuls' elegant chiaroscuro. Anouilh and Vadim stick closely to Arthur Schnitzler's original but the film is obviously embroidered with imagery of Vadim's creation - a visual superfluity."
Writing in ''The Observer'',
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at ''The Observer'', he praised Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956), and encouraged the emerging wave of ...
called the film "a masterpiece of colour photography" and "the nearest approach to an organised work of art that M. Vadim has yet directed."
The movie was advertised in New York with an eight-story billboard in
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection, tourist destination, entertainment hub, and neighborhood in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It is formed by the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 42nd Street. Together with adjacent ...
that displayed a nude Fonda. She subsequently sued the producers for $3 million. Fonda said:
"To me it was a great big opportunity to do a beautiful comedy and my first costume picture," recalled Fonda. "They ruined it here n the US
N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''.
History
...
That awful dubbed English. And that big poster of me, nude! Vadim resented it too."
''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' reviewer Eugene Archer called the film "a total debacle... a dull, pointless, ineptly acted vulgarization of a distinguished play, with nothing to recommend it beyond some attractive color photography."
Awards
The film was nominated for the
Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film is a Golden Globe Award presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Until 1986, it was known as the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film, meaning that any non-American film coul ...
.
Censorship
In 1967, Vadim and five of the film's stars were charged with obscenity in Italy for the film's content.
[Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda Face Obscenity Charge
Chicago Tribune, 26 April 1967: b5.]
See also
*
''La Ronde'' (1950 film) (The Round-Dance), a film directed by
Max Ophüls
Maximillian Oppenheimer (; 6 May 1902 – 26 March 1957), known as Max Ophüls (; ), was a German-French film director who worked in Germany (1931–1933), France (1933–1940 and 1950–1957), and the United States (1947–1950). He made near ...
, based on the same play
* ', a 1973 film directed by
Otto Schenk
Otto Schenk (born 12 June 1930, in Vienna) is an Austrian actor, and theater and opera director.
Life and career
Schenk was born to Catholic parents. His father, a lawyer, had Jewish roots and therefore lost his job after the Anschluss in 1938. ...
, also based on the play
References
External links
*
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{{La Ronde navbox
1964 films
1964 drama films
French films based on plays
Films based on works by Arthur Schnitzler
Films directed by Roger Vadim
Films set in 1913
Adultery in films
Films about prostitution in France
Films produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim
Remakes of French films
Films with screenplays by Jean Anouilh
French drama films
1960s French-language films
1960s French films