Verdict
Summary
From a story and plot standpoint, Two Weeks in September is all melodrama and a meandering mishmash of watching a woman go through an emotional ride. It exists purely for the camera to gaze into star Brigitte Bardot’s beautiful face and see how she reacts and behaves while the camera tries to understand her. Is that enough for a movie to have a reason to exist? Well … it depends on how much you find yourself transfixed by Bardot, one of cinema’s greatest beauties.
Plot:
A beautiful model has her first affair.
Review:
Happily married to a businessman who loves her, French fashion model Cecile (Brigitte Bardot) gets on a plane to London for a fashion assignment and doesn’t look back. While there, she enjoys the scene with some other models, and she becomes distracted by a slightly younger man (Laurent Terzieff) who carries on with his pet, a sad-eyed basset hound and somehow manages to charm her, despite her best efforts to not be charmed. Over the next few days, their paths cross several more times (he’s staying at the same hotel), and within a few days they are hanging out; first, it’s seemingly innocent, but soon they’re holding hands and in a blink of an eye they’ve crossed the line and are sleeping together. Cecile knows that she can never go back to that point when she was faithful to her husband, but she also knows that this new man in her life has changed something deep within her and that the rest of her life will be an entirely new frontier to traverse as her heart has split into two halves.
From a story and plot standpoint, Two Weeks in September is all melodrama and a meandering mishmash of watching a woman go through an emotional ride. It exists purely for the camera to gaze into star Brigitte Bardot’s beautiful face and see how she reacts and behaves while the camera tries to understand her. Is that enough for a movie to have a reason to exist? Well … it depends on how much you find yourself transfixed by Bardot, one of cinema’s greatest beauties. I’d only ever seen her once before in the Sean Connery western Shalako, so I’m not really a “fan” of this creature, but I can certainly see the appeal. Did I enjoy watching her in Two Weeks in September? Sort of, but the movie meanders and never has a follow-through of purpose, and so I’m left with only Bardot to ruminate on. She’s beautiful, impenetrable, and she’s lost in pensive thought here, but as a man looking for a place to hang his proverbial movie hat on, this is not the hat rack for me. From director Serge Bourguignon.
Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray edition of Two Weeks in September is presented in lovely high definition in a sharp 2:39:1 aspect ratio, and comes with an audio commentary by a film historian, as well as a bonus Bardot trailer.
