Véronique et son cancre (1958)

Véronique et son cancre is a French film comedy first released in 1958, directed by Eric Rohmer.  The film stars Nicole Berger and Stella Dassas.  It has also been released under the title: Veronica and her dunce.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


A middle-class woman engages a younger woman, Véronique, to give private tuition to her lazy and undisciplined son.   Having made no progress in mathematics, Véronique attempts to get the young boy to write an essay, but without success.  Why waste time writing in two pages what you can say in two lines?

Although pretty inconsequential when set aside much of Rohmer’s subsequent work, this short film manages to be both charming and also offer an insight into Rohmer’s early film-making technique.  Even at this early stage in his career, the director is far more preoccupied with showing the developing relationships between people (here a young boy and his private teacher) than constructing a sophisticated narrative.  Whilst the film feels somewhat more contrived and less spontaneous than his subsequent films, it is nonetheless an engaging work, which also provides an amusing and incisive satire on bourgeois life.

© James Travers 2002

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