A Time for Loving

A Time for Loving (1972)

The story of an apartment in Paris and the various people that occupy it over the years.

Date of release
1972-04-01
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Christopher Miles

Casting

Interesting facts

A Time for Loving is a 1972 British film directed by Christopher Miles and starring Joanna Shimkus and Mel Ferrer. The screenplay was by the French playwright Jean Anouilh. It is a bitter-sweet nostalgic look at Paris just before and during the second World War as seen by three couples, who over the years rent the same artist's studio in Montmartre.

Production

After the success of The Virgin and the Gypsy, Dimitri de Grunwald, who had arranged the finance through his European Consortium, teamed up with Christopher Miles again, who in gratitude agreed to direct A Time for Loving as long as a meeting could be arranged with Jean Anouilh to discuss the screenplay. This de Grunwald arranged in the Hotel Provençal in the South of France near where Anouilh lived.

This 1930s hotel, in which the bar hosted Scott Fitzgerald where he wrote Tender is the night was to close the following year, and reflected that elusive bygone era which Anouilh was trying to capture. Anouilh agreed to meet Miles at the bar at 5 pm the night of Bastille Day 1970 and see if it was possible for him to reconsider some aspects of the screenplay for the modern audience.

In fact Anouilh did help later with some rewriting by improving the interlocking dialogue for some of the sequences, which were needed in a hurry as shooting was to begin in Paris on Pont Alexandre III which had to be closed to the public for filming on 4 August 1970, a studio built on an existing house in Rue Berthe, Montmartre, as well as its interiors to be designed and built by Theo Meurisse at the Studio Boulogne, all to be co- ordinated by…

Anouilh had set his script in Montparnasse, but by the 1970s the modern towers dominated the exteriors, so Miles moved the location to Montmartre which he knew well from his student days. This meant getting helpful co-operation from his old friends, the local vegetable market sellers, the butcher, the local artists and the poet Pierre Jacob and his wife Josia to play small roles and appear in the film.

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