A timid attempt to get Romy schneider out of the costume melodramas,the finer feelings ,and the well-to-do characters .But still under her mother Magda' s watchful eye .It was to be the last mother-and-daughter movie, and to top it all ,Joseph Meinrad ,who was Sissi's colonel-bodyguard portrays her father!
It begins as an American comedy ,with a family of artists : dad is a detective story writer ,mom a composer, kid sister a painter and Eva (Schneider) a poet .All their attempts fail dismally .Realizing that writing about the whispering wind does not attract the audience's attention , Eva decides to write a play about a "free" young ingenue, moving in a risqué racy world where she cynically experiments love affairs with plenty of lovers .This daring work,which meets tremendous success seems anodyne today (it was so at the time too).
And when the dust settles , one is left with another "moral" if a bit "nouvelle vague in jeans " adventure for the abdicated empress.
In fact,the most interesting side of this otherwise mediocre movie is Schneider 's transformation : in her first scenes ,she's the serious highbrow,complete with austere hairdo and spectacles ;while writing about sex,she becomes the attractive sexy actress she would be in her later films such " la piscine" or "les choses de la vie" .
If you want to see a real risqué movie of Schneider in the glorious sanitized fifties , you've got to choose the remake of "Mädchen in Uniform" (1958) ,the movie she made after turning down the offer of 1,000,000 Marks to make a fourth " Sissi" ,much to her mother's displeasure.
