La Dentellière (1977)
Directed by Claude Goretta

Film Review

By the late 1970s, Claude Goretta had become one of Switzerland's most highly regarded filmmakers, enjoying something of the acclaim and attention that was lavished on his contemporary Alain Tanner.  His 1973 film L'Invitation had earned him an Oscar nomination and took the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, so by the time he came to make his most famous film, La Dentellière (a.k.a. The Lacemaker) he was an internationally recognised and confident film director.  Afflicted with a deep-seated social conscience, Goretta was incapable of making a film without a political slant, and so what first appears to be a slight coming-of-age drama is in fact a remarkably incisive study in class alienation.  It's a truism that true love can overcome all obstacles, but in Goretta's bleakly pessimistic world the one thing that love cannot transcend is class.

Based on Pascal Lainé's acclaimed novel of the same title (winner of the 1974 Prix Goncourt), La Dentellière depicts, with startling simplicity, the emotional martyrdom of an innocent young woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with a man from another social background.  She is an introverted hairdresser, with no desire to improve her mind nor her personal circumstances.   He is a smug bourgeois intellectual who clearly wants to get on.  The rift becomes apparent only when these two young people move in together and realise they have nothing in common.  The gradual breakdown in their relationship is painful to watch but it is inevitable.  She is a pleb, he is a toff, and never the twain shall meet.  Neither character is to blame for the failure of their love affair, and neither seems able to comprehend why it has failed.  They are separated by a force that is just too great for them to resist, their class identity.

Under the guiding hand of a director as skilled and humane as Goretta, La Dentellière could hardly avoid being a potent piece of cinema, but the inspired casting of 21-year-old Isabelle Huppert in the lead female role gives it a special poignancy and charm.  Huppert had by this time appeared in supporting roles in a dozen films, including a brief fling in Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses (1974), but this was her breakthrough role, one that earned her her first Best Actress César nomination and won her a BAFTA for Most Promising Actress.  For an actress who is now famous for playing perverse, predatory and powerful females, it seems odd that her first important role should be that of a passive innocent, but it is a part that the young Huppert inhabits with a sense of tragic ease.  Even though her character is virtually mute, her conversation consisting mostly of mumbled monosyllabic answers to questions, she conveys so much of her character's inner world, and with such astounding subtlety that no one who watched her in this film could doubt that she had a phenomenal career ahead of her.  After this remarkable debut, Isabelle Huppert was destined to be one of France's greatest screen actresses.  Unfortunately for Claude Goretta it was to be a career highpoint - he would never again deliver a film of such lyrical power and sensitivity.

Film Synopsis

Pomme may be 19 but, in her outlook and behaviour, she is still a child.  A trainee hairdresser in Paris, she lives in her dreams and makes no attempt to find herself a boyfriend.  How happy she appears, in her chaste little world!  Her friend Marylène could not be more different.  After her latest lover deserts her, she decides to take charge of Pomme's sentimental education and promptly whisks her off to the quaint Normandy town of Cabourg for a well-deserved holiday.  Here, Marylène soon finds herself a new boyfriend, leaving Pomme to while away her empty hours by herself as best she can.  She doesn't remain lonely for long, however.  A good-looking arts student named François engages her in conversation and before Pomme knows it she has found herself a new friend.

François is almost as chronically shy with the opposite sex as Pomme is, but somehow these two young people develop a close attachment and enjoy being together.  Once the holiday is over Pomme agrees to move in with François, sharing his modest Paris apartment.  It is only now that Pomme and François begin to realise how ill-suited they are.  They come from completely different worlds.  François is a cultured intellectual, a man of varied interests; Pomme is practically uneducated and knows next to nothing about the world.  Pomme is always out of place whenever her lover introduces her to his friends, and when François presents his girlfriend to his bourgeois mother she makes it clearly understood that the girl is not of their milieu.

It isn't long before Pomme gets the message and comes to accept that she and François are totally ill-suited for one another.  Though inside her heart is breaking, she leaves him without making a scene, knowing it is for the best.  Some months later, François is surprised to learn that Pomme has been admitted to a psychiatric clinic.  When he visits her she seems not to recognise him.  Her life came to an end when she left him, and for the rest of her days she is likely to remain like this - a hollow shell of a woman, placidly devoted to her work as a lacemaker, her sole preoccupation.  François quietly walks, knowing he will never see Pomme again.