Tete A Tete (2005)

She was his ''darling little Beaver''; he was her ''dear Leprechaun.'' Existentialist power couple Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are famed for their lifelong exchange of theories, letters, and lovers. But as Hazel Rowley shows in Tete A Tete, for all their bombast about freedom and communicating truthfully, both philosophers were often insecure and hypocritical (de Beauvoir, for one, publicly denied sleeping with women during her lifetime, but her personal letters overwhelmingly prove otherwise). Drawing on unpublished letters and new interviews with romantic casualties from both sides, Rowley artfully alternates between depicting Sartre and his ''little wife'' as café-lounging, leftist intellectuals, and jealous, cruel sexual manipulators straight out of Dangerous Liaisons.

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