this is not a terrible film, and probably even a good one, but couldn't help but question the ethical issues of translating this particular novel into film. charbrol seems all too ready to exploit his underage actress, which does tell the story effectively, but then begs the question, why tell this story at all? probably such concepts as "age of consent" are somewhat arbitrary, but then again most very young women who have sexual experiences with older men as young teenagers don't exactly appreciate it, and appreciate it even less in hindsight.had to delete from my hard drive for obvious reasons, won't be watching again in the foreseeable future.

Reviewers have complained that this film does not capture enough of the book by Henry Miller and includes things he did not write. Of the additions, for me the frame story rings poignant and true. On the Californian coast we see the dying Miller obsessed by one last unconsummated passion for a beautiful young nude model, a recreation of the bewitching teenage Colette he had lost. Outside on the beach the ghosts of his old Parisian friends gather for him to join them. Then we move into his memories.Of these, the added stuff about fascism and communism in 1930s Paris does seem feeble. But my defence for both departures is that they are at worst ironic and at best comic. The real Miller and some of his friends may have taken themselves fairly seriously but in this film the cavortings and occasional soul-searchings of American exiles in Paris, immune from the harsh political facts of European life, border on the absurd. His devotion to Proust is treated satirically and to a Parisian his frequent comparisons with Brooklyn are merely ridiculous.In fact we see virtually no real Paris, the city being most of the time conveyed by sets, which deliberately distance the story to a dreamy insubstantial past. Like the artificiality of the book, the film creates a fantasy world, one of untrustworthy recollection from a gifted, persuasive but ultimately unreliable narrator. Though actuality does intrude when Colette runs away and jumps onto a very real Metro train, so leaving the imaginary sphere for the quotidian. While intensely autobiographical, incorporating wholesale people he knew at the time, Miller's work is fiction. It is not a diary but a melody spun out of his experience, looking beyond outward events to his inward poetic and philosophical reflections. This last dimension is what I miss in Chabrol's film, which mostly stays closer to the colourful surface occurrences of the characters' lives. Although I don't think many male viewers will complain about the often revealed surfaces of the many lovely women.

This Claude Chabrol film is (obviously) quite unpopular with Henry Miller fans because it is not especially faithful to his original book. Still, the late Chabrol was a talent nearly on par with Stanley Kubrick, and has certainly earned the right to "re-imagine" works of literature the same way Kubrick often did with stuff like Stephen King's "The Shining" or Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". Miller was a better writer than King, of course, if certainly not in the class of Nabokov. Like Nabokov though, a faithful film adaptation of his best books would be well nigh impossible, which is why this unfaithful one is really no less successful than the more faithful 1970 Danish version. It has its share of sex scenes, of course, but is not as sexually fixated as Miller's writings or the earlier Danish adaptation, choosing instead to focus on the two male characters' fixation/unrequited love for the teenage "Collete" character, who falls into their lecherous hands after her prostitute grandmother dies and wills one of them her brothel.The modern-day flashback story where an elderly Miller is painting a nude picture of a "Collete" look-alike (who may only exist in his imagination) while cursing the "one-that-got-away" has nothing to do with Miller, of course, but is actually the best scene in the movie (unrequited fantasy is always more thematically interesting than the sexual over-indulgence Miller usually traded in). At any rate, the modern-day scenes don't detract from the 1930's setting nearly as much as the hippie-looking girls and that horrid Country Joe and the Fish title song featured in the dated 1970 Danish version.The acting is indeed a liability. Andrew McCarthy is better than usual, but then he's usually awful. Barbara DeRossi (as a prostitute/love interest) is good, but underused, and newcomer Stephanie Cotta (who plays "Collette") doesn't need to act too much, which is fortunate because she really can't. This IS certainly a misfire within the oeuvre of Chabrol, who is much better at subtle Hitchcockian thrillers and is actually one of the few French directors who HASN'T generally traded in sex-oriented films like this. This isn't bad, just not really noteworthy either.

Different from many other Chabrol movies that follow "Hitchock-like" patterns, _Jours tranquilles à Clichy_ relates the days a young American writer (Henry Miller) spent in the Gay Paris of the early thirties, with his polish-descent friend and their young Colette, a 14 years old-ish girl with whom they both fall in love. The story in itself doesn't send us from a surprising even to another but slowly lifts the curtain over the prostitution, pornography, libertinage and partying that seemed to oppose Paris so much to New York, in the eyes of Miller, searching for a change from the dull like he lead before. The story is a quest for Proust and his lost time, a quest for a new life, for thrills, for truth in forgetting oneself...