The principle of anachronism is common to theater and cinema in the 20th century, although it was derived much earlier. A few centuries before the art of moving pictures, artists in their static paintings depicted the scene of the crucifixion of Christ in the scenery and clothing of their time. But it was a spiritual intention, and anachronism in the last century is more associated with psychological intent: it is tempting to try the material for strength, to check how organic it is in decades and will not disperse at the seam of the modern way of feeling and living.
That’s why the movie leaves a double impression. Having made a loud debut in the previous decade, he has been losing ground since the early 1960s, which is not surprising when you consider what a pleiad of directors and actors began their tumultuous activities at that time. Actually, the main male role in this film was played by Jean-Claude Briali, one of the style-forming actors of the “new wave”. But the waves are new and the directorial methods are quite old. “Education of the senses” produces a rather old-fashioned impression (despite the exact observance of the camera-per principle in the film), although Astryuk did what brings him closer to modernity, namely, placed Flaubert’s famous plot in the “frame” of quite trivial citizens of Paris. Yes, some are richer and others poorer, but the passions depicted fit perfectly into the geometric figure of an isosceles triangle with adultery, mesalliance and other nominations that came to us from the French language to denote the affairs of the amorous. It seems that Astryuk, filming the drama, shot the melodrama.
On the other hand, the above-mentioned principle of camera-per, the transformation of the production into a letter, the likening of camera work to the handwriting of a pen, about which Astryuk wrote back in 1948, all this principle is observed in the film quite accurately. However, the confident handwriting of the master looks unprofitable next to the sweeping hooliganism of younger colleagues, for whom the literary centrism of cinema, frankly, is not new. This is an example of a director being held hostage to his method. In the film there is also Paris, in the film there are wonderful melodies, a great basis and its professional interpretation not for the sake of modernization as such, but as an escape from the mothball of costumed tapes. However, the director seems to adhere to dogma, the film turns out to be a somewhat heavyweight, as if draped literary pretext with all his suspension. That’s a pity, because if there were more cinema in “Sense Education”, the result could be more artistically interesting.
7 out of 10