In the film, Jeanne Moreau has a lover in Paris,
a rich one on his polo horse, and a new one,
archaeologist and poor, connoisseur of good bones,
met on the side of a road when her car
breaks down during the back and forth of Dijon Paris
Paris Dijon. The husband in Dijon is unbearable
in his sarcastic neglect of her.
How can anyone resist her pouty lips,
dismissed by cameramen as not photogenic—
I want to kiss those lips, their weary blues.
Her orgasm, shown as a trembling hand,
labeled The Lovers pornographic
until the case reached the United States Supreme Court,
Justice Potter Stewart ruling, I know it when I see it,
and this is not porn, he so famously declared.
I remember, in an interview, she announced
that sex as an older woman was undignified,
which I thought so sad. But, in the film,
the path of existence as domestic furniture
deviates in unexpected ways: one night of making love
and there she goes with the new lover, in his mini
Citroën, away into the sunrise, into a revised life,
escaping the death so resident in her old one.
And sex is a little death, sure, but escape from death too,
done here to the music of Brahms.
Besides, her archaeologist makes her laugh.
I don’t want to see her die for not one,
but two indiscretions, this being 1958. What courage
she has driving away from the Lake of Indifference
to Terra Incognita, as the map drawn at the beginning
of the movie lays out the land of love!
Not even one time does she look back.