Minne, l'ingénue libertine (1950)
Directed by Jacqueline Audry

Film Review

It was her adaptation of Colette's famous novel Gigi that put director Jacqueline Audry on the map and launched her lead actress in that film, Danièle Delorme, on her prolific screen career.  Immediately after this success, Audry and Delorme pooled their respective talents on another exemplary Colette adaptation, this time the writer's 1909 novel L'Ingénue libertine.  With its amusing but delicate treatment of a free-spirited young woman's search for freedom and fulfilment by challenging the social strictures of her time, the film has an unmistakable feminist slant and presages the more provocative films that Audry would subsequently make, Olivia (1951) and Mitsou (1956).

One of the remarkably few female directors working in a male-dominated industry, Jacqueline Audry brought a fresh approach to the portrayal of women in cinema, in much the same way that Colette did in early 20th century literature with her (at the time) scandalous novels.  In doing so, she was very much in the vanguard of the feminist movement and watching her films of the 1950s today one is easily impressed by the frankness and sincerity with which broaches the then thorny issue of female sexuality.  There is a refreshing honesty to Minne, l'ingénue libertine but also an innocence which, together with Audry's light-touch mise-en-scène and the film's authentic recreation of Belle Époque Paris, perfectly evokes Colette's unique world, an idyllic yet tightly corseted place in which women strive and fail to find fulfilment.

Danièle Delorme was excellent as Gigi and she is no less captivating as Minne, a likeable minx who, despite her habit of stripping down to her frilly underwear at the drop of a hat, comes across less as a woman of loose morals and more a romantic heroine at war with bourgeois respectability.  As her husband (humorously played by Franck Villard) is patently a conjugal inadequate, Minnie is justified in doing what the French casually term "faisant les 400 coups", the equivalent English expression being "sowing her wild oats".  Of course, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and Minnie's amorous itinerary is soon strewn with broken hearts and fractured egos, Jean Tissier being the only one of her victims to escape with his dignity intact, in the film's most memorable scene.  The mocking satirical tone of Colette's novel is scarcely discernible but to make up for this there are some humorous interludes, such as the sequence in which the heroine is trailed across Paris by the world's most inept private detective.  Being a light comedy, Minne, l'ingénue libertine hasn't the psychological depth of Audry's other literary adaptations but it is nonetheless an engaging piece, one of the director's most entertaining films.

Film Synopsis

Minnie is a flighty young woman who, bored with her mundane bourgeois existence, takes refuge in her childish fantasies.  On her wedding night, she regales her husband Antoine with a lurid account of a passionate liaison she once had with a hoodlum.  Of course, it is a pure fiction but Antoine swallows every word of it, not the best start to a marriage.  Unable to find fulfilment and happiness in the conjugal home, Minnie looks elsewhere for these and is soon pursuing a succession of brief romantic escapades with other men.  When Antoine begins to suspect that his wife is unfaithful, he engages the services of a private detective...