La Jeune folle (1952)
Directed by Yves Allégret

Film Review

Based on the novella Ar Follez yaouank by the nationalist Breton writer Fant Rozec, La Jeune folle fits easily into Yves Allégret's series of fatalistic film noir dramas that includes Dédée d'Anvers (1948) and Manèges (1950). One of Allégret's darkest films, it owes much of its brooding, doom-laden atmosphere to set designer Alexandre Trauner, who achieved similar results on Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes (1938).  Here the claustrophobic setting is not the mist-shrouded port of Le Havre but an eerily oppressive visualisation of Dublin in the 1920s.  A French film about the Irish Revolution is a strange thing indeed and a certain degree of suspension of disbelief is required when presented with an Ireland in which everyone speaks French and where the streets echo with the sound of children singing 'Alouette, gentille alouette'.  A greater failing is that the film has very little of the distinctive poetry of Rozec's original work, but what it does have by way of compensation is an extraordinary central performance by Danièle Delorme.

Delorme's potential as an actress had already been revealed in Gigi (1949) and Miquette et sa mère (1950) but it wasn't until La Jeune folle that she had her first great role, harrowingly convincing as an abused, easily manipulated orphan girl prone to delusional fantasies.  Allégret's film would have been bleak enough by virtue of its subject matter but Delorme's realistic portrayal of an innocent's slow and unavoidable descent into insanity makes it memorably grim. In some scenes, the emotional martyrdom of Delorme's character recalls the quiet suffering of Joan of Arc in Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), an impression that is reinforced by some saint-like portraits of the doomed heroine when confronted with the evils of the world.  How easy it is to overlook the performances from Henri Vidal and Maurice Ronet when our attention is totally monopolised by an actress who has attained the zenith of her art and delivers a performance of such exquisite poignancy.

The fate of Delorme's character Catherine powerfully symbolises the future of a divided Ireland, although Allégret uses the film not to make a political statement but to explore the irrationality of humankind.  In a sequence that recalls the dark lyricism of the director's earlier Une si jolie petite plage, a young republican is led down a stretch of beach and then cold-bloodedly shot dead by two of his comrades. Later, the heroine makes an impetuous vow to kill the man who murdered her beloved brother, not knowing that her intended victim is the man she has already fallen in love with.  Driven by the follies of revolution and piety, friend kills friend and lover kills lover, because in this insane whirlwind of confusion an abstract idea becomes more important than human life.  The abject tragedy of the human condition is succinctly summed up in the film's final shot of Catherine's broken face as her last fragments of reason slip away from her.  It is one of the most powerful endings to any French film, the Medusa visage that once seen will haunt the spectator forever.

Film Synopsis

Ireland 1922.  A nationalist uprising against England has claimed its first victims.  As she performs her domestic chores at a Dublin convent, orphan Catherine thinks only of her brother Kevin, a Republican who is on the run from the government forces.  As she is excessively sensitive and suffers from hallucinations, Catherine is known by everyone as the 'young mad woman'.  One evening, she imagines hearing her brother calling to her in her dreams and decides there and then to run away and head for the capital.  In fact, Kevin has already been shot at dawn as a traitor to the revolutionary cause.  Three of his companions - Jim, Tom and Steve - welcome the distraught girl, but opt to keep from her the truth about her brother's death.  Having fallen in love with Catherine, Steve takes her back to the convent, but by a strange coincidence the brother of the mother superior is also killed the same day for supporting the rebels...