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Overview
La Provinciale is a French film first released in 1981,
directed by Claude Goretta.
The film stars Nathalie Baye, Angela Winkler, Bruno Ganz, Patrick Chesnais and Jean Davy.
It has also been released under the title: The Girl from Lorraine.
Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.
Synopsis
Christine, a 30-year old woman, leaves her friends and home in a small provincial town
and moves to Paris to start a new career. Alone and jobless, she is drawn into an
affair with a married man. When that leads nowhere, she befriends an unemployed
actress who resorts to prostitution to make ends meet. Christine’s initial optimism
about making a new start soon turns to disillusionment...
Film Review
As in Claude Goretta’s previous film, La
Dentellière, rated as one of his best, La Provinciale revolves around
a young woman who finds herself displaced into a world in which she fails to find her
feet. Whereas the heroine in the earlier film (played magnificently by Isabelle
Huppert) is portrayed as an innocent victim, the heroine of La Provinciale is a
strong-minded independent woman who is able to make a conscious choice about whether she
should belong in her new world. The film offers a sombre reflection of the divisions
which exist in society and shows the difficulty of starting afresh in a world when individuals
have lost the ability to communicate.
Whereas La Dentellière is a deeply moving study about the vulnerability of an outsider, a totally absorbing film, La Provinciale lacks focus and has an episodic structure which makes it difficult for the viewer to engage with the film. Part of the problem is that the character Christine (admirably played by Nathalie Baye) is much more complex and ambiguous than the character Béatrice in La Dentellière and the film doesn’t reveal perhaps as much as it should about what motivates her. This certainly lessens the film’s impact, although it is still possible to appreciate Goretta’s distinctively melancholic style of film. © James Travers 2002 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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