Billy Wilder
Arianna (Love in the afternoon)

"A film about love, the most physical kind, but the work of a dry heart" (Cahiers du Cinéma)

Billy Wilder, as we know, was one of the most influential directors of the 20th century, navigating through the most disparate cinematic genres (noir, comedy, drama, courtroom films) with an ease and lightness that are (almost) impossible to describe. He belongs, along with Howard Hawks, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch (for whom he was initially a screenwriter and from whom he learned much, if not everything), to those authors whose imprint has long since vanished from American auteur cinema, which is too "thought out" to please rather than "thought out" to tell, narrate, entertain.

"Love in the Afternoon" (1957), based on a novel by Claude Anet, "Ariane", (1924), of which there were already three unreleased film versions in Italy ("Ariane" (1931), which moves the action from Paris to Germany; "Ariane jeune fille russe" (1931); "The Loves of Ariane" (1931), all in the same year and all directed by the same director, Paul Czinner), marks the first collaboration between Wilder and his longtime screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, with whom he would write, among others, "Some Like It Hot" (1959); "The Apartment" (1960); "Kiss Me, Stupid" (1964); "The Front Page" (1974).

It is a magnificent film, let's be clear right from the start, the second Parisian chapter after "Sabrina" (1954) and the second collaboration with Audrey Hepburn, here in her most dazzling period. As in the previous work, here too the trap of love is set by someone no longer exactly young, in our case Gary Cooper, already 56 years old. She is the cellist daughter of a shrewd private detective (Maurice Chevalier, in his first role free from songs, who delights in speaking a delightful English with French nuances) and falls in love with a man whom the father was actually tailing, Mr. Flannagan, a wealthy man who, despite approaching 60, still chases women (he has who knows how many in every city where he stays), lives it up between parties and lavish cocktails and, perhaps for the first time, through meeting Arianna (the Hepburn, that is) will truly fall in love. The ending (almost thrilling) should not be recounted, a mix of tears and laughter as only Wilder (and a few others) knew how to blend.

The lightness of the entire work, which lasts 130', yet seems half as long due to its pace, is absolute, and some details are remarkable. The hymn to love, which must overcome age and class, seems obvious but is highly effective, better to emphasize Wilder's concept of "making love": the prologue is a concise summary on love in Paris (which seems like the one about love in Manhattan, from the men to the city, which will later be the start of the eponymous film, 1979, by and with Woody Allen), but the love in the film is limited to modest kisses, hidden love (like the hidden nature of the protagonists, hence clandestine) is the basis of the film, which shows and does not show, reveals and conceals, plays on the still pleasing yet inevitably aged face of Gary Cooper with an incredible use of lighting (cinematography by William C. Mellor). Concealment, but sensuality appears in every shot, and Hepburn is a volcano of youthful, if not almost childlike, eroticism, which, as often in Wilder's comedies, has a core of amorality bordering on indecency.

It should be noted that it was precisely this veil, which today seems phenomenal, that perplexed the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma (among them, future director François Truffaut) enough to brand Wilder as a "dry heart", barren. Quite the opposite, as with Cukor's "Sylvia Scarlett" (1935), who managed to render Katharine Hepburn sensual in male attire (another absolute masterpiece), here Wilder enhances Hepburn's sensuality by fleetingly framing an ankle bracelet ("slave" style) or the innocent braids which exude a desire for love, and implicitly, sex.

To counterbalance, there's the good-naturedness of the great Maurice Chevalier, plus some gags that are among the best ever scripted by Diamond and Wilder. Primarily, the leitmotif of the Gypsy musicians who accompany Flannagan everywhere, from the boat trip to the sauna (the tune they strum, and which sustains the entire film, is "Fascination", a waltz that appeared in an old and long-forgotten 1932 film, "The House on 56th Street", which itself refers to an Italian song from 1904, "Malombra", which was said, in the industry, to be unlucky), up to the famous sequence of the trolleys with liquors thrown here and there in the Ritz hotel room in a kind of ping pong between said violinists and a desperate Cooper grappling with a (hoax) message left by Hepburn via dictaphone.

"All this seems immersed like in a bath of molasses of the seemingly most disarming romanticism: only that molasses, by virtue of its exasperated sweetness, was vitriol, and what emerges is the stripped-down and skimmed image of convention, its spectral double, the questioning of cinema or, at least, of one of its roles in production, which undergoes in those years, with crisis and financial transformations, the stages of its metamorphosis" (Alessandro Cappabianca, Wilder, Il Castoro Cinema).

It's a pity, just, for the very poor use of backdrops (in the hotel scenes, with the open window, what should be a Parisian square is indistinctly a cardboard cutout), but it's a trivial complaint faced by even Hitchcock in some of his films in the early 1960s.

There is a shorter version, 125', edited for reasons unknown, in 1961. Unfortunately, it is the one still present in the DVD version in Italy.