Jean Seberg is the star of a 1961 French film, The Five Day Lover, wherein she plays the mistress—a married one with children—of the currently unemployed Antoine (Jean-Pierre Cassel), regularly kept by his lover (Micheline Presle).
This is a Philippe de Broca movie, with some of the French New Wave’s froth, and it treats infidelity as lightly as it does romantic love in general. That’s a problem. What’s more, if this is a comedy, it’s nearly devoid of laughs. Yet Lover is an artistically tasteful, genuinely romantic production—neither very strong nor a failure. The main actors are careful and endearing. . . But, again, not very strong; and, in point of fact, I suspect it has weakened with time.
(In French with English subtitles)
