Judith Therpauve (1978)
Directed by Patrice Chéreau

Film Review

Patrice Chéreau's second film is this heavy social realist drama featuring a former legend of French cinema, Simone Signoret (now sadly past her best).  The film is a depressing study about the futility of trying to apply the ideals of the past in the modern world.  In spite of the generally good production values, the film cannot be classed as one of Chéreau's better works.  It is ponderously slow in places and has great difficulty engaging its audience.  One major fault is that the characters are not fully developed and seem to just pop up from nowhere without much explanation of the their background.   The film's message is also frustratingly ambiguous and the tragic ending has surprisingly little impact, probably because of its inevitability.  Signoret's performance is typically charismatic but lacks the intensity and pathos needed for the film to have any real impact on its spectator.

Film Synopsis

After the death of her husband, a respected combatant who served in the French Resistance during the war, Judith Therpauve lives alone in her country house.  Now in her fifties, she is surprised when, one day, she is visited by some old friends and invited to take over the running of a regional newspaper, La Libre République.  The paper's present editor, Claude Hirsch-Balland, who founded it after the Liberation, is now in hospital, close to death.  Judith realises that the newspaper is in severe financial difficulty, with a dwindling circulation and fierce competition from rival papers, but she agrees to take on the role that has been offered to her.  For the paper to survive, Judith has to introduce some significant changes, and not all of her staff are on her side.  As the paper's readership declines even further, it loses its most important advertisers, and Judith is forced to mortgage everything she owns when the banks refuse to bail her out.  When a rival launches a free newspaper funded entirely by advertisements Judith realises that the game is up...