Bernard Lorain

A Palestinian seeks Israeli permission to waive curfew to give his son a fine wedding. The military governor's condition is that he and his officers attend. The groom berates his father for agreeing. Women ritually prepare the bride; men prepare the groom. Guests gather. The Arab youths plot violence. One Israeli officer swoons in the heat and Arab women take her into the cool house. A thoroughbred gets loose and runs to a mined field; soldiers and Arabs must cooperate to rescue it. As darkness falls, tensions between army and villagers rise, and the groom's wedding-night anger and impotence threaten family dignity and honor. Can cool heads prevail?

Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.

In this routine drama, two men (a crass Brit and a slow Frenchman) decide to evade the war in 1917, but their flight on a stolen boat goes awry and they end up on the coast of France, close to the fighting they wanted to leave behind. Once on shore, they make the acquaintance of a like-minded young widow who begins an affair with both men (she just wants to have a child by each) -- but their unusually idyllic existence is threatened with imminent tragedy as the French army advances ever closer.

1930. Adelaide is fed up with Paris and founds a 'retreat' for her women friends in a Breton port. They live well and take their pleasure seriously, until the attractive sailor Thomas arrives and nothing is ever the same again.