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Goodbye Again
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by MGM (Video & DVD)
Sales Rank: 1777
Price: $19.98
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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. <br /> <br />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.
Viewer Reviews
This love story, initially called Aimez-vous Brahms (Do You Like Brahms?) contains all of the themes necessary to make it a continuous classic.
Three major performances given by three tremendous actors. Ingrid Bergman in one of her later roles is heart-breakingly beautiful, and Anthony Perkins gives a performance so joyful, vulnerable and nuanced, I find something different in it every time I see it.
Add to it a time in Paris that is magical and a score by Brahms that is unforgettable.
When will this be available in DVD?!
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