Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps)

A landmark film of the postwar period, Devil in the Flesh scandalized many critics with its outspoken exaltation of physical love between a passionate schoolboy (Gérard Philipe) and a soldier's wife several years his senior (Micheline Presle). But champions of the film to this day consider its love scenes to be the most beautiful ever filmed. Based on an autobiographical novel by Raymond Radiguet, written when the author was seventeen (he died at twenty), the story was set during the First World War, but its images spoke to an entire generation of young adults who had just survived the Second; like the film's young protagonists, they sought beauty (but found despair) in a period of hopeless confusion. The film is laid out in agonizing flashbacks, from a funeral procession that coincides, ironically, with the Armistice Day celebration in a French town, to the love between the boy and the young woman and its destruction at the hands of an unsympathetic community.