Customer Reviews

Goodbye Again [VHS]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Put on your pjs, make the popcorn, and settle back for one superb chick-flick! Ingrid Bergman stars as a sophisticated Parisian who has had an "understanding" with Yves Montand for five years. The understanding is she's madly in love with and faithful to him; he's free to date other women and see her when it's convenient. Enter Anthony Perkins as a rich, spoiled young man who falls head over heels for Ingrid. She's flattered, but she's forty; should she stop waiting for Yves and start a relationship with this twenty-five year old?

This film whisks you away to another time in the movies, when ladies always wore gloves, men always wore suits or tuxedos, and everyone smoked (glamorously). It's hard to take your eyes off Ingrid Bergman. She is stunningly beautiful and a consummate actress. Your eyes, however, will most definitely be drawn to the gorgeous Mr. Montand, who plays the amorous cad with such aplomb. Anthony Perkins' character is a needy, immature, almost creepy stalker. It's an unusual performance. The film is based on Françoise Sagan's Aimez-vous Brahms? and the rich and romantic sounds of Brahms' Symphony No. 3 in F add to the drama.

I heartily recommend Goodbye Again to those who enjoy films with romance, heartbreak, and beautiful music.

Any fan of Ingrid Bergman and Brahms must own this video. This movie, set in Paris in the early `60s, was made solely to give Bergman a chance to let out all the stops and flaunt her incredible range. The depth of her vulnerability and strength will astonish you. Anthony Perkins is charming. Not only is the acting superb, the soundtrack (based on variations of a Brahms march) compliments the story perfectly.

If you like movies about love, romance, and the pain of breaking up, then this one is for you. Ingrid Bergman is flawless in her role (and in her beauty). Anthony Perkins does a fine job, but at times he seems almost too silly. Better experts than myself will have to determine if that's just the character he plays or if it is his own personality peeking through. There is quite a contrast between his character and the one played by Yves Montand. Montand's is the ultimate in sophistication, rarely showing his vulnerable side. When he admits to having one-night stands with many other girls ("That's just the way I am"), and he sees the hurt it causes Bergman, you want to smack him.

The Bergman/Perkins romance is bittersweet. Once is it seen that it will not last, the pain they feel you can almost feel yourself.

This is an excellent film.

Perkins captures the charm and passion of a young man trapped in his socially privileged circumstances who falls in love with a taken although unmarried older Ingrid Bergman, while the stunningly beautiful Bergman plays a confident woman who, deep inside, is desperate for her noncommittal beau's love (Yves Montand). A strong businesswoman by day, at night she craves his attention and weakens, accepting his indiscretions with floozies. She eventually succumbs to Perkin's charms as he courts her, for although a man much her junior, he gives her the love and attentions she craves from Montand.

We watch Bergman and Perkins play a dance of both truth and daydreams, and we question what is really possible, what is really felt, and, what is love?

This question is asked during a scene where Perkins' character is in a jazz bar and asks the signer, "what is love?" She replies in song, and unlike most films where I feel uneasy with the campy musical scenes, this is GOOD. (And who is she? Someone please leave a comment and let me know.) This one scene captures the feeling of the whole film- lovely, tragic, blue, above social mores, passionate feelings lurking beneath, truth coming out from the young but the hard truths lived by the more mature settled people.

At the film's conclusion we don't have a clear answer as to what love is, but we do know what it is not.

Anthony Perkins is wonderful in this role! It's almost like you want to fall in love with him, and Ingrid Bergman fans will love her performance. This is an instant classic. I can't get over their wonderful performance. Once you see this movie you'll fall in love! So Romantic you really find out what love is really about. Age doesn't matter when your really in love.

It amazes me to find out that Anthony Perkins won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award for his skittish, petulant performance as Philip, the aimless, lovestruck "younger man" in this 1961 Paris-set soap opera about a May-September romance with Paula, a successful, fortyish interior decorator ensnared in a going-nowhere relationship with Roger, an age-appropriate transportation businessman who has casual affairs with young women he dubs impersonally as "Maisie". Naturally, Roger takes Paula for granted, which leaves her vulnerable to Philip's flirtatious advances. However, Perkins is an actor intractably tethered to his definitive role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and unfortunately in his first follow-up film, he emits an aura of creepy adolescent obsession that makes you fear more for Paula's life than her heart.

On the upside is Ingrid Bergman's textured performance as Paula, and her mature beauty seems to reflect perfectly her saturnine situation. She is believably matched with Yves Montand as Roger in a performance that seems to echo his real-life situation with wife Simone Signoret when he embarked on a well-publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe the year before. Jesse Royce Landis shows up in her typical role as a pompous society matron, this time Philip's cheapskate mother, while Diahann Carroll shows up in a disposable cameo as a world-weary jazz chanteuse. Director Anatole Litvak paces the film a bit too leisurely and adds some silly but amusing touches like Paula's delusion of rain as she drives during a crying jag, but he creatively uses a circular structure to his plot by beginning and ending the film with almost the same scene. Adapting Francoise Sagan's Aimez-vous Brahms ..., screenwriter Samuel Taylor lends the sort of wry observations he contributed to his scripts for Sabrina and Vertigo. As of April 2008, this film is not available on DVD.

I stumbled onto this movie the other night on TCM, and since it starred Ingrid Bergman (who I am eternally smitten) I decided that I had to watch it. What may to some be shrugged aside as nothing more than a well crafted `chick flick' actually turned itself into a beautifully pained look at the inevitable trap of age. It wasn't until the films final frame that it all hit me like a ton of bricks, the message so clear to me, that I had to watch the film all over again to fully appreciate all that I was being told.

`Goodbye Again' tells the story of a forty-year-old interior decorator named Paula Tessier living in Paris. She has been in a relationship with the very French Roger Demarest for five years, and while she loves him unconditionally he is far less than faithful to her love. Paula is constantly being cast aside by Roger for younger, more exciting fair, and she finds herself alone most nights. Then she meets the much younger Philip Van der Besh, a spoiled rich boy who happens to be the son of one of Paula's clients. He is immediately infatuated with her, but she is standoffish. He is much younger and she already spoken for, but when Roger continues to brush her off she begins to fall for Philip's persistence.

Of course, the relationship is not without its fair share of problems and detractors.

Like I said, from outward appearance this seems like yet another love story, but it is more than that, especially as it draws to its conclusion. Paula struggles to find her inner happiness amidst a society that has conditioned her to think one way. Sure, Philip is in love with her and his mother seems to be very happy with the idea of the two of them being an item, but her own preordained views on relationships leave her battling her heart and her head. She laments to a fleeting Philip "I'm old!" as if this were an end all to end all. The fact is that she is not old and he is not too young, but this is what she has been trained to believe, so whether or not she wants to, she has to.

Bergman is a beacon of light on the screen, commanding every inch of it with her flawless portrayal of this woman's strained emotions. There are quite a few scenes where she is looking at herself in the mirror, as if she were evaluating the person she is and the woman she wants to become. She has a mesmerizing command over her characters emotional deterioration; and that final shot, the look, that face; that revelation.

Breaks my heart.

Anthony Perkins is also quite good here, balancing his characters infatuation with true love and adoration. This is a far cry from the haunting performance he gave the previous year in `Psycho' and just goes to show that you should never typecast, no matter how good an actor is at one particular thing. Yves Montand is also very impressive as Roger, the heartbreaker himself.

I highly recommend this beautifully insightful film. Bergman was a goddess and should be regarded as such. It's a shame that these older films have yet to received the DVD treatment they so deserve. You can catch it on VHS or do a search for Bergman and wait for it to play on TCM, which I'm sure it will again soon.

This film is great because the characters are complex yet believable. Ingrid Bergman, the woman in love with a man who can never be faithful to her (tho he's honest about it). The man, Yves Montand, loves her but wants sex with other women who "mean nothing" to him. A very young, impetuous Anthony Perkins who's desperately in love with the 40-year-old Bergman. She has a relationship with him but can't love him the way she loves Montand.

It was interesting because no one was a villian. And everyone was in quite a predicament.

Of course the characters don't look or have the same lives as
ordinary people, but they behaved like real people would and it seemed to me the movie ended the only way it could.

Anthony Perkins is sympathetic as an empty, lost soul trying to be charming and charismatic. Montand's character never pretends to be anything but what he is. Bergman is a consumnate craftswoman. I think alot of women should be so lucky as to have her character's problem, even if she ends up the movie's big loser.

It's hard to know whether Bergman's character is really entirely
in love with Montand's character or just to much of a sap to ignore what the people around her are saying. The scene on the staircase would seem to reinforce the latter possibility.

The movie illustrates well the outcome of people who can't feel whole or content without other people.

Originally titled "Aimez Vous Brahms?" this splendid, and possibly the most successful adaptation to date of Ms. Sagan's novel brilliantly stars Ingrid Bergman as the older woman, Yves Montand as the roving lover with his "Maisie I', "Maisie 2" etc. flings [the same name simplifies things, he says]. ["Maisie's" famous comment about men always smoking 'afterwards' aptly punctures 'loverboy's' comments...], and of course, youthful Anthony Perkins as the young boy-toy? No, smitten lover with an 'older woman' complex.

All is superbly punctuated by Brahms seductive music. Wonderful images of Bergman with Perkins and Montand and yet another 'Maisie' accidentally meeting on the dance floor, also Bergman driving home after a conflict with Perkins, turning on the window-wipers, thinking its raining, but suddenly realizing she's crying.....quite a moment! Also her break-up with Perkins -"Philip - I'm old - old!" [Ahem! She's only 40ish....]

And the conclusion of this? Not quite "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" [another interesting slant] but close........

Also by Ms. Sagan? "A Certain Smile", and Preminger's "Bonjour Tristesse" with Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr and David Niven - yes! Another triangle of sorts!

Would be great to see a re-invention of this with Isabelle Adjani, Harrison Ford and perhaps Josh Hartnett?