The Wedding Ring (1971)

Boring

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Very strange but good looking film from little known director, Christian de Challonges which was a pretty ambitious project to take on but these were strange times in cinema, especially French cinema. Jean-Claude Carriere stars but also wrote the screenplay which is based upon his own novel. Indeed he was better known as writer and veteran of very many screenplays including several for Luis Bunuel and some of those he also appeared. Anna Karina, best known for her work with Goddard, is wonderful here, radiant throughout. Carriere is also most effective as the obsessive veterinary surgeon and if he seems to only have one expression it is a worrying one. Creepy and worrying is the name of the game here as the couple's Parisian is gradually filled with animals and insects as the two humans become more and more suspicious of each other. Ultimately unsatisfying, the film is nevertheless compelling and well worth a watch.

This very fine movie has a sad ending.The previous posts asked what the tape record was. Basically it is "I never told her that I loved her"But there is a technical goof in that final shot. This is a cassette recorder, buried in sand, and looping while failing on this sentence.It is possible with a vinyl record, but NOT on a normal cassette player, even if it is badly damaged, the tape cannot loop.Beside this, the story builds up from the beginning in a funny and mysterious way. The hunt for a wife with a 'Large apartment' and a closet is doted with humorous comments, and the various patients are more bizarre as the script goes on.

Although prolific French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere had appeared in bit parts from the outset of his film career – from Pierre Etaix's HAPPY ANNIVERSARY (1962; which he also co-directed with the star comedian) to Luis Bunuel's DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID (1964; portraying a country priest in the first of his 6 celebrated collaborations with the Spanish surrealist master) and THE MILKY WAY (1969; as a heretical bishop!) – and, according to the IMDb, he went on to make 32 film appearances in all, the latest in Abbas Kiorastami's CERTIFIED COPY (2010) – it is still unusual to find him carrying a film on his shoulders as an actor, albeit sharing the burden with iconic Danish actress Anna Karina; this is the main reason I decided to watch THE WEDDING RING on the occasion of Carriere's 80th birthday and, as it happened, his co-star here turned 71 herself within days! The film in question – originally entitled L'ALLIANCE which is a much better name than the bland and misleading one accorded it for screenings in English-speaking territories – was also the first (and so far only) one to be sourced from a novel he had penned himself and this may be one of the reasons for this artistic change of pace; even stranger is the fact that a virtual unknown director was trusted with helming the offbeat enterprise that some have read into it a modern-day updating of the "Garden of Eden" parable – with the equally intriguing MALEVIL (1981) and DOCTOR PETIOT (1990) being the only other entries of note in his trim filmography. Having said that, Carriere is perfectly cast in the lead of the virginal veterinarian who seeks the services of a marriage agency to find himself a wife whose chief prerequisite, apparently, is that she own a large house in Paris with a closet room included!Meeting Karina during an on-site visit to the qualified house she inhabits on her own, he overhears the latter speaking on the phone to the chief of the marriage agency about him; they still get married and, once installed on the premises, he is soon obsessed with finding out what lies inside the locked closet (a query which she had earlier dismissed). When he does eventually force it open – during one of his wife's curious shopping sprees that never see her bringing anything back home with her – he finds several manly accessories (fishing rods, bedside slippers, etc.) which indicate the presence of a man who had lived there before him. To makes matters worse, he starts noticing that his supply of ether (which he uses while performing surgery on his animal patients) is steadily decreasing and begins to suspect that Karina makes use of drugs during her absences but is unable to acquire factual evidence when he follows her around town. As if Carriere's exotic clientele – from hamsters to chamaleons to parrots – is not off-putting enough (especially to the fearful maid), the vet starts receiving potentially dangerous animals in the mail – from insects (I wonder if Bunuel's lifelong fascination with them had rubbed off on his fixture of a collaborator by then!) to monkeys to a snake! When the latter goes missing after Karina gets a little too curious of finding out what is inside a wooden box that has lain unopened for days in her husband's study – initiating a panic-stricken search inside the house by the civil authorities – Carriere virtually accuses her of wanting to poison him. Actually, it was a vengeful act on the wife's part after listening to the husband's dissection of their marriage laid down on tape. This incident creates an irreparable rift in their alliance – which, rather than copulation as an end to procreation (sexual gratification can be excluded outright in this company) had previously culminated in her assisting him in animal operations.The eventual coda is as unexpected and bizarre as it is satisfying and thought-provoking: for days, Carriere had locked himself in his study minutely documenting the behavior of the animals which had gradually been growing more frantic. At the very point where the animals' agitation and the consequent interconnection between the couple are at its highest levels, the end of the world comes to pass; there are no spectacular sequences of mass destruction or panicking people to be found here and the viewer should not expect it because the film does not need them either. The very next – and final – image of the film is of the tape recorder in the middle of a now-barren landscape from where still emanates (but only for a short while before it gets distorted) Carriere's voice speaking about Karina. Unfortunately, the English subtitles available on the copy I watched are occasionally ungrammatical, as if the film's dialogue had been translated by someone to whom English is not his mother tongue...but that can hardly dampen the quirky if low-key brilliance of this unjustly forgotten, little gem.

Christian de Chalonge works mainly in TV now, but his few films showed a great imagination. Who can forget Docteur Petiot, the mad doctor of Vichy France who killed Jews trying to escape the trains bound for death camps? Just the musical score--that saw--was enough to make me doubt my sanity. L'Alliance is a beautiful fantasy film that should really be reissued on DVD.Anna Karina is a newly-wed wealthy woman who finds her husband is spying on her, following her around on shopping trips. That he is a veterinarian who is slowly building a zoo in her lovely house is also ample cause for concern. Her curiosity--and mounting suspicion of his motives--one day lead her to open a box, allowing a snake to escape. The parallel with Adam and Eve is gracefully worked out. This film is full of lovely details: the women who bring their weird pets to the vet look pretty strange themselves; the vet has a melancholic expression that never changes, it's as though he has taken on the personality of one of the animals. I was more impressed with this one than with effects-ridden films like Jurassic Park or The Island of Dr Moreau.