SOURCE: Romney, Jonathan. “Love's Torments.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 325 (21 October 1994): 35.

In the following review, Romney praises Bitter Moon as an underrated film that effectively uses irony and excess in order to deconstruct the conventional romantic love story.

L'amour toujours, in French cinema at least, means nothing more than “business as usual”. Thirty-five years after Jeanne Moreau's definitive display of the art of ooh-and-aahing in Louis Malle's Les Amants, French film-makers still can't seem to get enough of the tropes of grand passion. Some impressionable young critic in the bowels of the Paris Cinematèque must have gawped at Jean Gabin's pithy imprecation, “Tes beaux yeux …”, taken it literally, and rushed out to spread a gospel that has lasted generations. From François Truffaut building an entire career on indulging his Svengali syndrome, to Patrice Leconte's weedy gentleman of a certain age convulsing themselves over fantasy odalisques, or...