Louisa, een woord van liefde

Summary

Pierre Drouot and Paul Collet's film L'étreinte (The Embrace) - a kind of intimate Story of O - assured them a somewhat scandalous reputation. Their poetic-impressionistic Louisa, een woord van liefde (Louisa, a Word of Love) proved less controversial. Although the film's subject was just as provocative and tabooed, this time its message was couched in a 19th-century romanticism more palatable to the masses.

Using Manet's painting 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' as point of departure, Drouot and Collet devised a script (doctored by Jean Ferry) based on a harmonious love triangle between two itinerant artists and a female aristocrat. Unlike François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961), love is not destroyed by the powerlessness of the individual in this film, but by bourgeois morality, the hypocrisy of the nobility and the violence of war, presented as the sources of all evils.

This sentimental tale advocating free love and communal life, filmed in attractive soft-focus by director al photography Eddy Van der Enden, naturally appealed strongly to the ideals of the non-conformist, pacifist anti-Vietnam generation. The directors readily admitted that they had the response of this target audience firmly in mind when they started making the film. Both the Belgian press and the public reacted enthusiastically. Budgeted at 12 million Belgian francs, it played in cinemas in Brussels and Antwerp for 13 weeks and was also released in France.