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.

Information

original title
Louisa, een woord van liefde
alternative title
Een woord van liefde
production year
1972
censorship date
01-04-1972
first screening
03-05-1972
country
Belgium, Netherlands
category
Fiction
applicant inspection
director
dutch rental (original)
producer
producer
production company
production company
production company

Technical notations

runtime
107
original length
2966
censorship length
2966
sound
Sound
colour
Colour
format
35mm

Resources

Centrale Commissie voor de Filmkeuring (Algemeen Rijks Archief;  P245)
Johan J. Vincent, Naslagwerk over de Vlaamse film: ('Het Leentje'), Brussel (1986), pp. 303-306
Marianne Thys (ed.), Belgian Cinema - Le Cinéma Belge - De Belgische film, Gent-Amsterdam (1999), p. 498

more information

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