''Sundays and Cybèle'' is a 1962 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 in , directed by

Serge Bourguignon Serge Bourguignon (, born 3 September 1928) is a French film director and screenwriter. His film ''Sundays and Cybele'' won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (known as Bes ...

. Its original French title is ''Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray'' (''Sundays in Ville d'Avray''), referring to the

Ville-d'Avray Ville-d'Avray () is a Communes of France, commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the Kilometre zero, centre of Paris. The commune is part of the arrondissement of Boulogne-Billancourt in the Hauts-de-Seine Department ...

suburb of

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. The film tells the tragic story of a young girl who is befriended by an innocent but emotionally disabled veteran of the

French Indochina War The First Indochina War (generally known as the Indochina War in France, and as the Anti-French Resistance War in Vietnam) began in French Indochina from 19 December 1946 to 20 July 1954 between France and Việt Minh (Democratic Republic of Vi ...

. The film is based on a novel by , who collaborated on the screenplay.

Plot

Pierre suffers from amnesia after a war-time accident in which he might have killed a young Vietnamese girl while crash-landing his stricken plane. His nurse, Madeleine, lives with him in a low-key but potentially romantic relationship. When Pierre sees Cybèle, a young girl in distress as her obviously loveless father is dropping her off at an orphanage, he befriends her. Each of the two is lonely, childlike, and in need of a supportive friend. Eventually, he pretends to be the girl's father, which allows her to escape the locked orphanage for a day, and he shares every one of his Sundays with her for months. Pierre conceals his friendship with Cybèle from Madeleine, but she eventually finds out, and tells Bernard, a doctor who has a romantic interest in her. Bernard assumes the girl to be in danger, and notifies the police, who adopt the same assumption. Pierre has nothing to give Cybèle for Christmas, so he accepts her facetious challenge to bring her the metal rooster from the top of a Gothic church near the orphanage. While Cybèle falls asleep, awaiting Pierre for their Christmas together in the snow-covered park's gazebo, the former pilot musters the nerve to climb the 300-foot steeple. With his knife as a tool to unscrew the rooster, he brings it down. As he returns to Cybèle, with the metal rooster and his knife in his hands, the police arrive and shoot him dead to "protect" the child, whom they imagine to be in danger. Cybèle awakens to the horror of seeing that her friend is dead and cries in anguish.

Cast

Hardy Krüger Hardy Krüger (; born Eberhard August Franz Ewald Krüger; 12 April 1928 – 19 January 2022) was a German actor and author, who appeared in more than 60 films from 1944 onwards. After becoming a film star in Germany in the 1950s, Krüger increa ...

as Pierre *

Nicole Courcel Nicole Marie Jeanne Andrieu (21 October 1931 – 25 June 2016), better known as Nicole Courcel, was a French actress who achieved popularity through the 1950s and 1960s, though she is mostly unknown outside of France. Born in Saint-Cloud, in ...

as Madeleine *

Patricia Gozzi Patricia Gozzi (born 12 April 1950) is a French actress. She is best known for her starring roles in '' Sundays and Cybèle'' and ''Rapture''. ''Hung Up "Hung Up" is a song by American singer Madonna from her tenth studio album ''Confessi ...

as Cybèle/Françoise *

Daniel Ivernel Daniel Ivernel (3 June 1920 – 11 November 1999) was a French film actor. He appeared in 50 films between 1947 and 1981. Filmography References External links * 1920 births 1999 deaths French male film actors People from Versai ...

as Carlos *

André Oumansky André Oumansky (born 15 August 1933) is a French actor. He appeared in more than eighty films since 1958. Filmography References External links * 1933 births Living people French male film actors French male television actors ...

as Bernard

Reception

Critical response

''Sundays and Cybele'' has an approval rating of 55% on

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, based on 11 reviews, and an average rating of 6.3/10.

Awards and nominations

''Sundays and Cybele'' won the 1962

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (known as Best Foreign Language Film prior to 2020) is one of the Academy Awards handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to a ...

. The nominations for writing and scoring were for the 1963 Academy Awards the following year.

References

External links

* * * *
''Sundays and Cybèle: Innocent Love?''
an essay by

Ginette Vincendeau Ginette Vincendeau (born 1948) is a French-born British-based academic who is a professor of film studies at King's College London. Early life and education Vincendeau was educated at the Lycée Lamartine and Lycée Sophie Germain in Paris, ...

at the

Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinep ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sundays And Cybele 1962 films 1962 drama films Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winners 1960s French-language films French black-and-white films Films about orphans Films directed by Serge Bourguignon Films scored by Maurice Jarre