Attempting to trace a pattern in the work of the great French filmmaker Louis Malle is a way to lose your mind. He is associated with the French New Wave, but never went in for all that self-aggrandising swagger. He worked across fiction and nonfiction, wackiness and despair, France and America, genre and arthouse. He worked with gallic icons of yesterday (Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Maurice Ronet), American indie godheads before they were American indie godheads (Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon), and assorted megastars of stage and screen (Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche, Burt Lancaster). A retrospective of his work streaming on FilmStruck could offer vital clues to that daunting question: who was Louis Malle?
His best-known films are Lift to the Scaffold, Atlantic City, My Dinner With Andre and…
