I was searching for a possible theatrical distributor for "SUNDAYS AND
CYBELE" and came across the first review below. That one is pretty explicit
in addressing what definitely could be seen as an "icky" aspect to the
story. The relationship between the guilty and PTSD-suffering former pilot
and a 12 year-old girl is clearly-even if tender and chaste-romantic. The
writer of the first review clearly feels that contemporary audiences (it was
written In 2014) are likely to be much more disturbed and more resistant to
this story than audiences were in 1962 when it was released and then won the
Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1963. I have found two additional reviews. One is
from 1962 by the NY Times then-chief film critic Bosley Crowther and the
other is also from 2014 upon its Criterion release. The latter two reviews
are more favorable (Crowther clearly prefers its take on relationships
between an adult man and a young girl than the one presented in "LOLITA."),
but both address the psychosexual relationships between the adult man, his
pre-teen girlfriend, and his adult girlfriend (This is the reverse of what
we were discussing with "THE SWAN." There we were talking about a young girl
losing out to a more age-appropriate and sexually available rival. In
"SUNDAYS AND CYBELE," it appears that the dynamic is the adult female loses
the guy to the pre-teen.). These reviews provide quite a bit of detail on
the action and the themes. There are, of course, some other reviews that can
be accessed through the IMDb webpage or through RottenTomatoes. My question
is this: Is this a film we really want to show?
https://film.avclub.com/hindsight-hasn-t-been-kind-to-the-icky-french-classi
c-1798181519
https://www.nytimes.com/1962/11/13/archives/screen-sundays-and-cybele-opensf
rench-writerdirector-tell-tender.html
https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/sundays-and-cybele ;
