La Dentellière (1977) - film review

During a visit to a Normandy seaside resort with her friend, Marylene, a fragile and solitary young woman named Béatrice is befriended by an arts student, François.  Despite their intellectual and class differences, the couple fall in love and share a flat together in Paris.  Whilst Béatrice is content to be in love, François becomes increasingly frustrated with her unwillingness to better herself...

This well-observed and genuinely moving film from Swiss-born director Claude Goretta makes a pessimistic statement of the inability of love to surmount societal divisions.  The disintegration of the beautiful relationship between the young couple François and Béatrice when they realise their mutual incompatibility is handled with great subtlety and credibility, providing a genuinely tormenting experience for the viewer.  The film is laced with poignant significance and never has to resort to stylish sentimentality to achieve its effect.  Goretta tells a simple story with feckless ease, yet it is a story that is difficult to forget.

Both lead actors, Yves Beneyton and Isabelle Huppert, deserve credit for their compelling performances, which display a maturity and self-awareness that is way beyond their years of experience.  Although just 22 when she made this film, Huppert is captivating as the quiet, repressed Béatrice, the first major role in a remarkable film career which would see her become one of the most highly regarded actresses in the world.

© James Travers 2000


As breakthrough roles go, this one is going to take some beating.  Isabelle Huppert is simply beyond magnificent as the shy, lonely, fragile hairdresser’s assistant who finds romance whilst on holiday, only for the social gap to prove ultimately too wide to bridge.  One thing may give us pause.  The film was shot in 1977 and, so far as we know, the action takes place in that same year.  Yet it features a pretty 18 year old girl who admits to being a virgin and a courtship between two young people that would not be out of place in a 1940s/50s British film where repression was seen as a virtue.  Once you get round that anachronism, you can bask if not wallow in an incandescent performance from Huppert which is so standout that it doesn’t really matter that co-star Yves Beneyton is so wooden that he might well have been the victim of one of the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Director Claude Goretta remains in control right through to the poignant climax.  Takes its rightful place in the pantheon of great French films.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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