Jeunes filles en détresse (1939)
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Film Review

Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931) appears to have been the main inspiration for this contrived melodrama set in a girls' boarding school, the last film that the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst directed in France before returning to Nazi Germany in 1938.  Jeunes filles en détresse is a competently realised production (more typical of Hollywood than French cinema of the period) but it lacks the inspired touch that Pabst brought to his previous films and is scarcely recognisable as the work of one of Europe's leading cineastes.  The film's Achilles heel is its banal plot that deals a tad superficially with one of the most important social concerns of the day, namely the neglect of children by parents too preoccupied with their careers and other interests.  Instead of a mordant satire with a cogent moral, what Pabst delivers is little more than a charming and slightly saccharine crowd-pleaser that scarcely tickles the conscience.

If Pabst's direction is moderately below par, the same cannot be said of the performances from the predominantly young female cast.  Most impressive of all is a sprightly 16-year-old who dazzles in her first major screen role (having made her film debut the previous year) - Micheline Chassagne, here credited for the first time under her "borrowed" name Micheline Presle (taken from the character she plays in this film).  With seemingly unbounded charm and energy, Presle lights up the film, just as she would in so many films as one of France's biggest stars in the following decade.  The actress even gets to lead a sing-song, although her vocal talents are somewhat wasted on a toe-curling anti-divorce number that would be better suited for Shirley Temple.

Another instant eye-catcher is Louise Carletti, another immensely talented young actress who had something of Presle's star power but sadly never matched her success, despite appearing in some notable films in the 1940s.  Presle and Carletti have no difficulty eclipsing the more mature members of the cast (even actors as capable as André Luguet and Marcelle Chantal) but they meet their match in a wonderfully tyrannical Marguerite Moreno, who very nearly steals the film with another of her great comic harridan portrayals.  In the film's showdown, Moreno comes dangerously close to being driven into a swimming pool by her mutinous charges - but somehow (tragically) this passage à l'acte went unpassed.  Jeunes filles en détresse hardly rates as a classic but, thanks to its lively performances, it makes a highly enjoyable timewaster.

Film Synopsis

Jacques and Marthe Presle are too preoccupied with their respective careers - he is a divorce lawyer, she a busy surgeon - to devote much time to their teenage daughter Jacqueline.  Fearing they are neglecting their child, the couple finally decide to place her in a girls' boarding school run by the formidable Madame Vuilliard.  Here, Jacqueline Presle soon strikes up a friendship with her roommate Margot and quickly discovers that most of her fellow boarders are the offspring of divorced parents.  Encouraged by her new friends, Jacqueline hastily sets about creating a league to outlaw divorce.  She does not yet know that her own parents' marriage is threatened when her father begins an affair with a famous actress, who happens to be Margot's mother...