La Garçonne (1957)
Directed by Jacqueline Audry

Film Review

After her groundbreaking Olivia (1951), which dealt honestly and sensitively with a lesbian relationship between a school headmistress and one of her pupils, Jacqueline Audry was eminently well suited to adapt Victor Margueritte's La Garçonne, a novel that created the mother of all sensations when it was first published in 1922.  Widely branded as moral and corrupting in its time, the novel had two screen adaptations prior to Audry's.  The first, directed by Armand Du Plessy in 1923, was so controversial that it was banned shortly after its release; the second, directed by Jean de Limur in 1936, was also condemned but was a commercial success.  Curiously, Audry avoids (or at least downplays) the more provocative aspects of the original novel and instead emphasises its feminist agenda - a woman's right to choose her own life, rather than go along with what society and convention expect of her.

Audry's La Garçonne appears laughably tame in comparison with Jean de Limur's more widely seen adaptation, which has no qualms about presenting a cinema audience with explicit allusions to a lesbian love affair and drug-taking orgies.  Even in its raunchiest scene - the one in which a muscle-bound (mostly) naked male dancer performs an erotic dance - Audry stays well on the side of decency and good taste.  The only real surprise comes at the end, when the attractive young heroine decides to throw up her life of hedonistic self-indulgence so that she can settle down in marital bliss with a man old enough to be her grandfather.  Compared with Audry's earlier work (including her commendable Colette adaptations Gigi and Minne), La Garçonne appears staggeringly toothless and banal.

By this stage in her career, with the young Turks of the French New Wave poised to make her appear even more old hat and redundant than she actually was, Jacqueline Audry had become something of a spent force, and this shows in every subsequent film she made.  Her restrained brand of feminism was as dépassé as her directing style, and she would soon fade away into the shadows, her passing scarcely noticed.  La Garçonne is at least redeemed by Marcel Achard's crisp dialogue and some astute acting from the principal performers Andrée Debar, Fernand Gravey and Jean Danet.  Debar's strikingly androgynous features make her a natural casting choice for the role of the titular Tom Boy, although she would be better served by her next collaboration with Audry, Le Secret du chevalier d'Éon (1959).  Attractively photographed in the pastel shades of a chic Parisian salon of the period, La Garçonne is the most satisfying and visually alluring of Audry's colour films, but a reluctance to fully embrace the shocking potentialities of Victor Margueritte's novel makes it a somewhat lacklustre and laboured affair.

Film Synopsis

In the early 1920s, Monique Sorbier, the daughter of a respectable bourgeois household, is about to marry her beloved Lucien Vigneret when she receives an anonymous letter accusing her fiancé of having a mistress.   Convinced of Lucien's infidelity, Monique immediately breaks off their engagement and, to the horror of her family and middle-class entourage, throws herself into the debauched life of a modern young woman.  She gains financial independence by running her own furniture and art boutique and acquires a succession of lovers, including a cabaret singer Niquette and a nude male dancer.  It is only when she renews her relationship with her former philosophy teacher Georges Sauvage that Monique discovers true love...