Customer Reviews

Sundays and Cybele [VHS]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Sundays and Cybele" is a beautiful film, sensitively handling the delicate subject of an adult male's love for a young girl. Unfortunately, it's another case of less than pristine elements being used to make a video transfer. As previous reviewers have noted, the widescreen print that's been transfered to video is quite poor, with dull contrast, heavy scratches, and extremely difficult to read subtitles. Amazingly, there is a better transfer available, a fine contrast print with deep grey tones and few scratches, and -get this- new, yellow subtitles! Unfortunately, it's a pan-and-scan version where you end up losing nearly half of the available image, but at least you can read the subtitles with ease. This version has turned up on cable tv over the last few years, but was never on video, as far as I can tell. Why a letterboxed video version hasn't been put together with the same or similar elements, I don't know. Until that happens though, we'll have to make do with what we have. It's a shame this is the case, because "Sundays and Cybele" deserves better.

This is first and foremost an extremely beautiful film. The photography, the composition, the pearly grays, the delicate reflections, the enchanting smile of Patricia Gozzi, her tears, all account for an unforgettable cinematic experience. Very much in the aesthetics of the sixties, following Ingmar Bergman, that was the time of Fellini and Antonioni, the time of glorious B&W.
The story has become somewhat less convincing with the passing of the years, although it remains painful and nostalgic and sweet. It describes the adult-child love relationship of Cybele and Pierre. Here the adult is the child, Pierre (Hardy Kruger), a pilot who suffered war trauma, amnesia and emotional anesthesia, and the child is the adult, the abandoned twelve-year old girl Cybele (Patricia Gozzi), who has grown in the midst of suffering and loneliness, and who behaves as the mature one in this anomalous and defenceless couple.
The tragedy looms in the air from the beginning and closes inexorably on Pierre and Cybele. The beauty of the scenery and the purity of their child love makes the tragedy more unfair and even more tragic. Their little secret refuge, the tiny microcosm the two lovers have built as a bubble to protect themselves from their inmense loneliness and their fear of the unbearable reality, is shattered like a crystal by the base suspicion of the "grown up" world. The end of the movie is almost unbearable in its suffering and its beauty. One cannot but compare with "The Virgin Spring" by Bergman.
It is unfortunate that neither Serge Bourguignon, the director and scriptwriter, nor Patricia Gozzi, were seen again in a film comparable in quality to this lovely 1962 best foreign movie of the year. I saw this movie first when I was a lonely and shy medical student, it never ever abandoned me afterwards, in all its nostalgic pain and tragic splendor.

This movie is really a masterpiece.? What a Shame it has never been publisshed in DVD. The quality of the available edition is extremely poor

This is one of my favorite films also. Having purchased the video, I watch it over & over again. The cinematography is stunning as is the acting, notably the performance of Patricia Gozzi, possibly the best child actress of all time. The evocative quality of the film -- the overcast, grimy post-war Parisian suburb life; the potency of the relationship between the shell-shocked veteran and orphaned girl; the stark beauty of the black and white photography -- makes it unusually powerful.

This is a movie I will always remember. I hope it will be realised on dvd.

Serge Bourguignon emerged as one of the best new directors of the French New Wave with 'Les Dimanches de Ville-d'Avray,' otherwise known as 'Sundays and Cybele.' The Ville-d'Avray of the title is the village outside Paris made famous by the Impressionist painter Corot. Henri Decae, the film's DP, worked miracles for Bourguignon, managing to capture the scenic beauty of the village while contrasting it with the distorted perspective of the shell-shocked Hardy Kruger character. The opening shots reveal the true cause of his hysteria - he was a pilot strafing a Indochinese village when he happened to notice, on the ground far below, a young girl transfixed with fear. Patrizia Gozzi, who made only one more film (to my knowledge), gives another of those performances of a lifetime that so few child-stars are capable of. She plays a neglected girl consigned to the charity of a convent school whom the near-catatonic Kruger is innocently drawn to. Bourguignon's career fell into the shadow of his first film, and never emerged again. Another casualty of the circus that is modern film production.

This is a wonderfully told story with fine acting performances all round. Unfortunately this Connoisseur Video dub is off of a below average quality print of the film. Be warned, the subtitles are not below the picture and on the black part of the screen, consequently they are at times difficult to read [i.e. white-on-white]. The original reel changes are also noticable. I am not sure whether a cleaner version of this film exists. These are minor faults which are typical of most 60s transfers.

I first saw this film at a small theatre in St. Louis, alas no longer in business. The images were such that they seemed engraved within my consciousness, at once soft and gentle but also harsh and powerful.

Sundays and Cybele details a kind of rare tenderness between an adult and a child, one that is in no way immoral or forbidden but is nonetheless foreign and even threatening to most adults, like some primitive urge that we repress without knowing why. I was reminded of some dialogue from The "Little Prince" by St. Exupery and the film captures a kind of timeless childlike quality, a feeling of mystery and magic shared by the character of the child, played by Patricia Gozzi as well as the adult, portrayed by Hardy Krueger, rendered to a child's level of insight by the tragedy surrounding a plane crash during the war.

There may be some elements of the film that are dated but they hardly represent major flaws and the film still has the ability to touch one deeply. I know of no other film quite like "Sundays & Cyble" and that in itself is rather sad.

A 12-old-girl in a cloister school, abandoned by all family members, and a 30-year-old man who lost his memory after an airplane crash. It is almost a random event that they meet, but every Sunday the man will take out the girl, and everyone thinks he is her father. A beautiful relation of decent love grows - but the end is very tragic. One of the greatest movies on children as real human beings with real human emotions.

Whomever Tom Keogh may be, who wrote the "editorial review" for this film, I must say he is completely mistaken. He comments that this splendid film "can't help but look terribly self-conscious now." To whom? To any but anyone with sufficient perspicacity to accept the quaintnesses of black&white and a superb directorial style. Anyone else, including myself, who has no problem accepting the easy transition between "now" (a word, like "reality," which makes sense only between inverted commas) and "then" and has some understanding of the extent to which international film has severely ossified since "then," must embrace Bourguignon's film with open arms. It is a masterpiece of the Nouvelle Vague as much as Truffaut's "Les 400 Coups" and Godard's "A bout du Souffle."