Three years later, in “8½” (streaming on Max, Criterion and Kanopy), Fellini once again cast Mastroianni as his stand-in, this time in director mode. In the role of Guido, Mastroianni is vexed not just by a crisis of creativity but also by the galaxy of women in his life. Sandra Milo is the indolent seductress, Claudia Cardinale is Guido’s ideal voluptuous virgin, Barbara Steele is a mod muse. Aimée plays Guido’s estranged wife, Luisa, the good thing he can’t hang onto. And while her place in his life is such that she doesn’t even show up until an hour into the movie, she’s the most luminous star in his cosmos — even if Fellini often hides her light under the bushel of what seem to be a deliberately clunky pair of black-rimmed glasses.
Her performance in the title role of 1961’s “Lola” (Criterion), the first feature by the French master of fanciful and melancholy romance, Jacques Demy, is perhaps her most extroverted. As a cabaret chanteuse in a quayside bar, she smiles when she sees a familiar face in her first scene — an American sailor who’s more than happy to give her cigarettes and vino upon their reunion — and lights up the saloon. She later attracts the attention of a beleaguered young salaryman out of her past. She’s glad to see him, too, but as is so often the case with cabaret chanteuses in quayside bars, she awaits her true love, the father of her young boy. Lola is a relative free spirit with an open heart but a sense of limits; Aimée’s performance emphasizes the essential innocence, or maybe insignificance, of her flirtations. The character is a male fantasy in her work, a devoted mother in her home and ultimately maybe a mystery even to herself.
The movie that made her an international household name was Claude Lelouch’s 1966 “A Man and a Woman” (streaming on Kanopy). The romance was an international hit with spectacular reach. (My parents, who were not predisposed to French cinema, not only saw it, they also bought the soundtrack, highlighting Francis Lai’s mega-catchy “da da da dada dada da” theme music, which was a significant factor in the picture’s success.) Lelouch’s extravagant directorial style fused New Wave speed and Hollywood schmaltz intoxicatingly. But without the chemistry between Aimée, who plays an independent woman (a widow, she works as a film script supervisor) swept up in a passionate affair with Jean-Louis Trintignant’s cool, calm and collected racecar driver (himself a widower), the rocket would not have achieved nearly so powerful an ignition as it did.
With enhanced stateside recognition came offers to work in Hollywood, which she took. Her luck with them was not great. The 1969 “Justine” (not streaming), in which she starred with frequent Godard leading lady Anna Karina, is mainly cited today as a deep cut among the director George Cukor’s cultists. The Sidney Lumet-directed “The Appointment” (not streaming), a 1969 psychological drama co-starring Omar Sharif, has yet to find its cult.
Aimée’s career was, in a sense, attended by the ghost of the German director Max Ophuls, whose graceful camera was often trained on some of cinema’s most distinctive leading ladies. Her 1958 movie, “Les Amants du Montparnasse” (not streaming), a biopic about Modigliani, was being prepared by Ophuls when he died before production; the director Jacques Becker completed it. And Demy’s “Lola” was inspired not just by the character made immortal by Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel” but also by the courtesan chronicled in Ophuls’s last completed picture, “ Lola Montès.”
