Hold on to your noses Salingerphobes, Therese is as obnoxiously psychotic on the screen as Seymour Glass is in print. We all remember how Seymour the Saviour was burdened with an ordinary (that is despicable) woman and how, despite his Oneness with Guatama, Hui-neng, Lao-tse, and Shankaracharya, he was 5000 sensitive he had to shoot his brains out. Well, Tutelary Therese doesn't quite die for us all, she poisons her ordinary husband instead.

Francois Mauriac adapted his Nobel-prize winning book, and Georges Franju--an allegedly fast rising young artist--directed two talented performers, Emmanuele Riva (of Hiroshima Mon Amour) as Therese, and Philippe Noiret (of Zazie) as Therese's husband, Bernard. It's hard to believe that such talent could belch up such obvious junk.

Therese delivers the keynote address in the opening scene. While ambling amongst the flowers, she pleasantly daydreams, "I've never understood that wild force within me . . . and beyond me." In a series of flashbacks, she recalls glimpses of her past which led to her attempted murder of Bernard. As the film crawls forward, it becomes clear that her husband eats too much too fast, has a lot of money, reads nothing but newspapers, shoots live animals, and above all, fears death only because he is so content. What else is there to do but poison him?

Therese appears obnoxious not because she marries the boor in the first place, nor because she fails even to try to make a go of it (this girl's so sensitive she's a fish in her wedding bed). What is so insufferable is that Mauriac and Franju create such a sympathetic Therese.

In a ridiculous final scene, she begins a new free life, agreeably separated from Bernard. Seeing Bernard for the last time at a Parisian cafe, Therese muses Christ-like to the audience, "If only he'd ask, I'd still go with him." Of course Bernard returns momentarily, but only to remind her he had covered the drinks. Oh-so-aware of Bernard's callousness she oh-so-philosophically observes that really she loved the sticks with Bernie as much as she now loves the city with no one, "because both sounded human." You and Seymour both, baby.

Yet Mauriac and Franju are no fools; why did they cast Therese as a sensitive heroine to begin with? The fault lies as much with their adaption of the novel as with the direction. By cutting the story of Therese's failure to make a new life in Paris, of her degeneration into a paranoid and confused old lady, they change a tragic character into a superficial one.

If intelligent direction could have saved the film, Franju was not up to it. With a sophisticated modern audience, problems of subconscious motivations and existential living require subtlety and understatement. Perhaps Truffaut's achievement in Jules and Jim is too much to ask, but when Franju has his lead remark, "Don't you realize how useless we are?" it's embarrassing.

After big disappointments like these, one begins looking for the little things. Like the dissolves which are out of phase. Or the photographer, Christian Matras, who didn't use a hydraulic tripod so that shots meant to be arty pans come off in irritating shakes.

Ludicrously heavy-handed, Therese is just no way to start Reading Period. But you should enjoy the short playing with it, The Old Man and the Flower--an intentional, not inadvertent, cartoon by Ernest Pintoff.