Les amitiés particulières (film)

Les amitiés particulières (This Special Friendship) is a 1964 film adaptation of the Roger Peyrefitte novel Les amitiés particulières directed by Jean Delannoy. It stars Francis Lacombrade as Georges, Didier Haudepin as Alexandre and Michel Bouquet as Père de Trennes. It was released in English as This Special Friendship. The film was produced by Christine Gouze-Rénal, whose sister Danielle was the wife of future French president François Mitterrand. The filming location for the movie was the 13th-century Royaumont Abbey, some 50 km north of Paris.

Les amitiés particulières
Directed byJean Delannoy
Produced byChristine Gouze-Rénal
Written byJean Aurenche
Pierre Bost
Roger Peyrefitte (novel)
StarringFrancis Lacombrade
Didier Haudepin
François Leccia
Dominique Maurin
Music byJean Prodromidès
CinematographyChristian Matras
Distributed byPathé Contemporary Films (USA)
Release date
  • 4 September 1964 (1964-09-04) (France)
  • 7 November 1967 (1967-11-07) (U.S.)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench

The movie is mostly true to the novel, changing only relatively minor plot points such as Alexandre's suicide from poisoning to death by throwing himself from a train. Also, Alexandre in the movie is brown-haired, not blond, which also removes some of the inside jokes between Alexandre and Georges which are present in the book.

On the set of the film, Peyrefitte, who was 57-years-old at the time, met the 12-year-old aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle who had been cast as a choir boy and was a big fan of the book. Not only did Peyrefitte sign Alain-Philippe's copy of the book but the two also fell in love, pursuing a stormy relationship that Peyrefitte chronicled in some of his later novels such as Notre amour (1967) and L'enfant de cœur (1978).

Alain-Philippe Malagnac was later married to the French entertainer Amanda Lear and died in a house fire in 2000 at the age of forty-nine, shortly after Peyrefitte's death. It is unknown whether this was a suicide, even though Peyrefitte in his novels describes a "suicide pact" between the two, i.e. their intention to commit suicide if the other one dies.

Cast
Cloister at Royaumont Abbey

Reception

James Travers of Filmsdefrance.com gave the film four out of five stars, saying: "The arresting performances from Francis Lacombrade (remarkably his one and only film credit) and child actor Didier Haudepin bring to the film a kind of raw edge, poetry and spiritual intensity that is rare, even in French love films. [...] Whilst Les Amitiés particulières stands as a powerful, deeply moving love story, it is actually far more than that. It is a pretty direct assault on the double standards and hypocrisies of contemporary society, which is forever governed by prejudice, petty rules and double standards."[1]

Soundtrack

In Other Media
  • The film was an inspiration for the famous manga The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio. Hagio was persuaded to see the film in the summer of 1970, and in November 1971 published the first 40 pages of the manga in the girls magazine Special Edition Shojo Comic.

References
  1. Travers, James (2007). "Les Amities particulieres (1964), a film by Jean Delannoy - review". Filmsdefrance.com. Retrieved 21 June 2019.
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