'L-Shaped Room': Cathartic Love

The L-Shaped Room is a disappointment. The advertising placards in the lobby prepare the moviegoer for another series of torrid bosoms heaving sadly on the usual brass bed in a dirty room. This expectation is not fulfilled. Although the range of characters and the setting are standard enough: an unwed mother, a struggling writer, a sensitive Negro, and an assortment of boarding-house types ranging from aging actress to waggish whore, the result is far from ordinary. Leslie Caron as Jane, the Wronged but Right Girl, and Tom Bell as the Starving Writer show a great deal of perception in this story that is frankly about love.

Jane, after finding how helpful a slick "doctor" is willing to be for fifty pounds ("but not on a weekend, please"), decides she wants to keep her unborn child. She takes a room at Doris's boarding house--"an Israel for bugs" with no exodus--to wait out her pregnancy.

Doris's is also a haven for most other types of lower animal life. The various inmates are skillfully introduced, not only by means of dialogue, but also through clever camera ployment. Jane encounters Toby Coleman, the angry young novelist, on the darkened stairwell during her first traumatic night at Doris's place. He soon falls madly in love with her. "I've been fooling you about not being on the make all this time. I am on the make, but I promise you that I am very manageable" he admits. Toby's manageability and his lack of it, plus Jane's well-disguised condition of approaching motherhood, are the elements of the drama which reaches an apex of pathos in the relations of two sensitive people in love. The circumstances surrounding Toby's introduction to the fact of Jane's pregnancy, amplified by his initial consignment of her to his file-drawer for virgins, send him into a depression that results ultimately in an enigamatic ending of the affair.

The characters and the situation in The L-Shaped Room may be familiar, but they both come alive to present, with poignant vividness, the pain and pleasure of love that is the essence of life. The laughter of the audience reflects, by its rueful tone the accuracy of the film at many moments. This movie seems to have the cathartic effect that other foreign films aim for, but usually miss because of a lack of subtlety that tries to pass for realism. Restraint is evident here where it is often lacking in other pictures--the photography is not bizarre, but merely piercing, the characters are not extreme, but completely effective. Even the homosexuality of the by-gone actress, Marvis, is not a stumbling block, but a key-stone. I find it rather unusual to be raving about a strip of cellulose, but The L-Shaped Room merits it.