rain streaks the coach windows as we surge home through the dark

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco 

A film made with vaseline and railway tracks, which takes some adjusting to; but you soon forget to read the subtitles, because you can understand all you need without them. It's based on the book Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, and explores a strange adolescence in provincial France at the end of the last century. In the film, Roger Corman meets Proust, Elvira Madigan rides again, and Renoir takes acid.


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HENRI ALAIN-FOURNIER'S "Le Grand Meaulnes," the author's only completed novel, was published in France in 1912. Two years later, Alain-Fournier was dead at 28, killed at Saint-Rémy in the opening days of World War I. Thus, "Le Grand Meaulnes," which was first published here in 1928, is not only a novel about the loss of innocence, but it is also a kind of enchanted legacy from one who was required to make, in effect, the ultimate acknowledgement of that loss.I'm sure this has something to do with the novel's continuing appeal both in this country and abroad. It might also explain the group of earnest young people who stood—singly and in pairs—outside the 34th Street East Theater at noontime yesterday, waiting for the first performance of Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's French movie version. There were young men in beards and fatigue pants, and girls in leather jackets and bell-bottom slacks, including two especially pretty girls with very long hair. They frowned quite a lot as they talked and carried what looked to be two cello cases, in addition to one copy of the Doubleday Anchor paperback."The Wanderer" is a movie for people who take their Alain-Fournier rather more seriously than they take their movies. It is, as Albicocco apparently intended, not an adaptation of the novel as much as it is an illustration of it, a movie that seeks to recreate a gentle sentiment so fulsomely that it becomes, instead, sentimental.Alain-Fournier's novel, in synopsis, sounds like the libretto for an opera. Augustin Meaulnes, a handsome young man of 18, loses his way late one winter afternoon and comes upon a strange, dilapidated manor house where a gala masquerade is in progress. The guests seem to be of all ages and social classes, and Meaulnes is accepted by them without question.In the course of the fete he meets and falls in love with Yvonne De Galais, the sister of the young man whose engagement is being celebrated. Suddenly, however, the engagement is canceled, the fete is stopped, and Meaulnes finds himself back home without any clear idea of where he has been.Thereafter, Le Grand Meaulnes, as his schoolmates call him, devotes his life to finding again the mysterious manor and retrieving his lost love. It is, however, a paradise that can never be regained.The movie, like the novel, is a parable about the search for happiness, but, unlike Alain-Fournier who wrote so literally about the fantastic that it always possessed a sort of commonplace magic, Albicocco indulges himself in such flamboyant photographics that the movie becomes almost too sweet and soft, like a piece of over-ripe fruit. Instead of being firm and clear in style, it is heavy with romanticized images, especially in the masquerade sequences that have been filmed through just about every kind of filter imaginable, including—from the looks of things—gauze and Vaseline.The effect is to remove the story, not only in time and place, but also in feeling, from anything that might honestly touch us.All of the performers have a decent purity about them appropriate to the tale. Brigitte Fossey, who is now 20 and whose first and only other screen appearance was 15 years ago in "Forbidden Games," plays the sad Yvonne, and brings to the role a quality blond beauty that I identify somehow with Griffith films. Jean Blaise is silent-movie handsome as Meaulnes, and Alain Libolt is dark and sad as his hero-worshiping friend, through whose eyes the story is seen.The movie, which has English subtitles, was photographed entirely in Sologne, where Alain-Fournier set his novel, and it possesses an extraordinary feeling for the countryside and the passing of the seasons. These tableaus, however, seem to exist for their own sake. "The Wanderer" is a memory movie often beautiful to look at, but so distant that I failed to recall even the pleasure I experienced when I first discovered the book many, many years ago. That is an even sadder loss of innocence