The story is told in a flashback by the character Tyvian Jones.[3]
Tyvian Jones, a Welsh author from a working-class coal mining background, comes to Venice, rich and famous from the success of his first novel and its film adaptation by the Italian director Sergio Branco Mallone. Sergio and Tyvian compete for the affections of Sergio's assistant Francesca, who falls in love with Tyvian and gets engaged to him, but wants to keep her job with Sergio. Tyvian resents Sergio's demands on Francesca's time, but still accepts an advance from Sergio to begin writing a new novel, which Sergio hopes to film.
Francesca leaves on a business trip to Rome with Sergio, and Tyvian returns to his Venice house to find it occupied by local businessman Pieri and his "friend", the erotic call girl Eva "Eve" Olivieri. The couple broke in to take shelter after their boat's rudder failed in a storm. Initially angry, Tyvian finds himself strongly attracted to Eve and, after throwing Pieri out of the house, tries unsuccessfully to seduce her. Eve knocks him unconscious and leaves.
Tyvian tracks Eve to her penthouse apartment in Rome, where she has many clients. After pursuing her for several days, he finally succeeds in having sex with her. She indicates her primary interest is money, and warns him not to fall in love with her. His friends see him out with Eve, causing an upset Francesca to confront him and Sergio to berate and threaten him. Despite this negative fallout, Tyvian cannot resist spending an expensive weekend in Venice with Eve, where he reveals to her that his best-selling book was actually written by his deceased brother. Tyvian has begun to drink heavily and ends up publicly humiliated and rejected by Eve, who used the weekend to make money gambling and connecting with wealthy new clients.
Tyvian marries Francesca. Meanwhile, Sergio has discovered that Tyvian lied about his past and did not write the book published under his name, but cannot get Francesca to leave Tyvian. While Francesca is away working with Sergio, Tyvian trysts with Eve in his home. Francesca unexpectedly returns, discovers Tyvian with Eve, and, distraught, rushes away in a motorboat and dies in a crash. The night of her funeral, Tyvian breaks into Eve's apartment seeking comfort, but Eve drives him out with a riding whip and pushes him into a garbage pile. Two years later, Sergio still mourns Francesca, while Tyvian haunts the bars of Venice and pursues a contemptuous Eve, who is planning to sail to the Greek islands with a wealthy Greek client.[4]
“Losey’s bitter experience with Eve, coupled with his own independent temperament, ensured that he would never hire himself out as a genial company man, or as a popular director of commodity material.” — Biographer Foster Hirsch in Joseph Losey (1980).[6]
Director Jean-Luc Godard was given the option to adapt the James Hadley Chase novel, but declined.[7] Actor Stanley Baker approached the Hakim brothers and recommended Losey, who had directed Baker in The Criminal (1960) and Blind Date (U.S. release)]] (1959).[8]
Eve was shot largely on on location around Venice. The film's sets were designed by the art directorsRichard Macdonald and Luigi Scaccianoce. Losey said he never would have normally chosen to make a film out of Chase's novel "but I made the film mine more than anything I have ever done."[9][10]
Losey said later the producers made cuts without his permission and the film was a disappointment to him.[11] Losey's original cut was 2 hours and 35 minutes long and was cut to 1 hour and 41 minutes for its release in Britain, with two parts redubbed and a new music track.[12][13]
The American release, entitled The Devil’s Woman, was further reduced to 1 hour and 20 minutes.[14]
Critical reception
The New York Times concluded "Mr. Losey said the producer ruined it by cutting. The rejoinder is: He didn't cut it enough";[15] while in a similarly unfavourable review, Dennis Schwartz opined "The story itself is the film's main problem, because it is so unsettling and perverse. It never lets in any sunlight";[16] however Derek Winnert noted "Losey's dark thriller is really rather effective and underrated, and the actors are spot on in tailor-made roles."[17]
Style
Critic Geoff Gardner at Senses of Cinema notes the importance Losey placed on elaborate sets designs and outrageous costumes in defining his film characters, arranged by designer Richard Macdonald:
Losey encouraged his regular designer Richard Macdonald to incorporate his elaborate settings, themselves designed to provide some running commentary on the characters who inhabited them: objects, curios and art works that gave even more emphasis and extravagance to the characters.[18][19]
Gardner adds: “In Eve, mirrors, glasses, ashtrays, furniture, paintings, feathered costumes, even whiter than white bathrooms, were all relentlessly delivered by Macdonald in an attempt to create a view of high life, self-indulgence and casual wealth.”[20]
Biographer Foster Hirsch echoes this analysis: “[W]e are regaled by Losey’s infatuation with elegant decor, with elaborate paintings and tapestries and statuary, with ornate mirrors and ceilings, with all the trappings of Continental sophistication.”[21]
Critics have dubbed Losey’s visual ornamentation as “baroque,” often approvingly. Eloise Ross at Senses of Cinema writes: “While Losey’s style was often unfairly criticized as “baroque, or over-ornate” he often produced “perfectly balanced compositions.”[22][23]
Hirsch observes that Losey’s fulsome application of “baroque mannerism” serves as compensation for an inadequate screenplay: “[T]he film has nothing to rely on but the visual personality of its director.” [24]
Moreau’s performance as Eva
Jeanne Moreau, in a 2001 interview with Senses of Cinema’s Dan Callahan, recalled:
Losey gave me total freedom. We worked long before we started shooting. We knew where this woman came from, we knew where she was born, and what happened to her. With a great director like Losey, you don’t speak when you shoot. We created Eve together.”[25]
Callahan adds this caveat regarding Losey’s handling of her “purely instinctual” acting: “Moreau herself risks absurdity in ten-minute blocs where Losey keeps his camera on her and lets her create.”[26]
Critic Geoff Gardner in Senses of Cinema which Moreau’s wordless performance is driven by detailed body language, she runs a bath to Billie Holiday’s “Willow Weep for Me” on the record player, and mooches coolly around a bedroom. While she is enjoying her luxury, there is also a sense of boredom in her; hearing voices outside, she is restless, and smacks her lips together as though planning her next move…in this early scene, Losey’s directorial control comes through.”[27]
Theme
Losey, in an effort to establish “dissonances between the sacred and profane,” sprinkles the production with biblical metaphors: A tapestry records the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise; Moreau “eats an apple.”[28] Film historian Raymond Durgnat in Films and Filming (April 1966) decodes other references in the narrative:
{{blockquote |[T]he commentary and statuary relate the story to the biblical myth of The Fall - with money as the fruit, Venice as an ironic garden of Eden, and Eve as an ironic Eve.[29]
Moreau, a modish Eve, is never at risk of suffering the fate of her Adam, played by Stanley Baker. Critic Foster Hirsch writes:
Eve is an amoral catalyst of male lust and insecurity; she is a remote femme fatale who wanders through the film creating havoc and then escapes untouched at the end, her own privacy unviolated.[30]
Film critic Eloise Ross remarks on the nature of the Moreau-Eve amalgam:
With this reference to the Biblical Eve, could Eva be a story of the original woman? Unlikely. But Jeanne Moreau, perhaps now still but definitely in 1962, was close enough to a figure of the iconic woman, the utmost woman.[31]
Retrospective appraisal
Critic Dan Callahan calls the film “an endlessly fascinating mess, Losey’s one truly personal, mysterious film.”[32][33]
Critic Eloise Rose writes: “While Losey may have been disappointed at the outcome of his film… Eve is now considered one of the director’s key works.”[34]
Footnotes
^Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (20 June 2013). Making Waves, Revised and Expanded: New Cinemas of the 1960s. A&C Black, 2013. ISBN978-1623566913.
^Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 160: Filmography Hirsch, 1980 p. 237-238: Filmography
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 62: “The film is told in flashback, from Tyvian’s point of view…”
^Gardner, 2001: “Jean-Luc Godard knocked back the job of directing Jeanne Moreau and Stanley Baker in an adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve.”
^Gardner, 2001: “It was [actor] Stanley Baker who suggested Losey as a replacement [for Godard]...”
^"FILM CRAFT: Joseph Losey talks to Peter Lennon". The Guardian. London. July 9, 1962. p. 5.
^”Losey is probably more attached to the film than or any of his other films…a result partly of the fact that he loved making it...”
^EUGENE ARCHER. (March 15, 1964). "EXPATRIATE RETRACES HIS STEPS: Joseph Losey Changes Direction With His British 'Servant'". The New York Times. p. X9.
^Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 2: “...the loss of final editing rights on Eve, a film the producers recut and shortened by some forty minutes, thus destroying Losey’s original conception…”
^Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 12: Losey himself acknowledged that Eve was a “baroque” film: “It’s the labeling that’s troublesome.” See here for Milne source.
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 60: “With Eve, Losey gives free play to his interest in baroque mannerism…” And: p. 63: “a stubbornly routine story...”And p. 223: “It is on weak or radically flawed scripts like Eve...” Note italics "but" in original.
^Callahan, 2003: “Eve (1962), a fragmented plunge into decadence dominated by a purely instinctual star performance from Jeanne Moreau in the title role.”
^Ross, 2018: “[W]hile Losey’s talent is undeniable, it has been noted that he must have been pleased to add a credit with Moreau to his catalog of work.”
