My great friend and ally in the French portion of the MCP programming effort, Phoebe Green, has penned a superb introduction to the MIDCENTURY MADNESS program for Saturday, April 2nd—where she applies her deep knowledge of French film history and culture to reintroduce two films by Jacqueline Audry, whose against-the-grain career is just beginning to receive the attention and respect it deserves. Merci beaucoup, Phoebe!
“My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884. I shall probably not die there.”
—Colette, Claudine à l’école
PUBLISHED in 1900, Colette’s novel was a zeitgeist-permeating success (to this day, a round collar on a blouse or jacket is a col Claudine), and has never gone out of print. In France, it established a literary type—the frank, quixotically sensual and romantic young girl—that Colette reproduced, in increasingly edulcorated versions, under her husband’s name, and triumphantly revived under her own to cheer the gray final days of the Occupation (while retaining the Belle Époque setting), as Gigi.
In 1949, Gigi was brought to the screen by a young woman, Jacqueline Audry (with the godmotherly approval of its author). It was a critical and popular success, one of the top ten films of the year, establishing Audry as a bankable (and the only recognized female) French director. Also in 1949, an 84-year-old Englishwoman, the translator and confidante of André Gide, published her only novel: Olivia, by “Olivia” (Dorothy Bussy), inspired by her teenage years at Les Ruches, a girls’ school near Fontainebleau. And in 1951, Audry directed a film adaptation of that novel.
When I first viewed that film, in a blurry print uploaded to YouTube in ten-minute segments, I was flabbergasted. Here was a girls’ school behind gilded gates, a Belle Époque harem headed by an acknowledged female couple, deliciously agitated by allegiances and favorites, where…
Edwige Feuillère descends a curving staircase flanked by her ravished pupils, here cupping a chin, there dropping a teasing rebuke, for all the world like Mae West inspecting a line of bodybuilders;
Simone Simon, a poisonous pussycat, mewls from a chaise longue, her icing-gun coiffure and glossy pout unified in ultrafemme blondeness;
…and Christmas is celebrated with a costumed and cross-dressed dance to rival Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party.
Since then the film has been restored, its exquisite details now crystal-clear, its sources and influences cleared of camp. It has been written up and analyzed, respectfully, glowingly, by contemporary critics and scholars.1 The wonder persists: this is—among many other things—lesbianism without tears.
Unlike The Well Of Loneliness (which Olivia’s American distributors nudgingly evoked by releasing it under the title The Pit Of Loneliness), love between women, while as fraught as any other love, is not doomed to sterile misery. Unlike Maedchen In Uniform, with its right-angled iron bars and hierarchical levels, this hermetic school world isn’t a prison; it is, from its ribbony staircase to its library roundtable where discussion literally circulates, a continuously twirling, swooping, luxurious round.
The adjective matriciel (from matrice/matrix) seems to occur as often in French as “seminal” does in English. A matrice is, first and literally, a womb; by extension, an element that provides support or structure and serves to shield, reproduce, or construct; a network—or, perhaps, a web. Indeed, a benevolent spider seems to spin her delicate threads from Marie Souvestre, the inspirational head of Les Ruches, to Dorothy Bussy; to Maedchen In Uniform (which Colette subtitled in France), to Jacqueline Audry; to a fifteen-year-old girl who played hooky to watch Audry shoot Olivia and later, as Françoise Sagan, created another culture-shaking young girl… and, of course, a spider’s web is a shimmering round.
Our young heroine Olivia (played by Marie-Claire Olivia, an Audry discovery renamed for the film—how many Olivias will there be?) enters the school grounds in a coach, the tinkling of its harness bells giving viewers of Belle De Jour quite a start.
There, Mademoiselle Julie—the Marie Souvestre figure played by Edwige Feuillère—opens a magic kingdom. She awakens Olivia to everything from Racine to the nuances of seasoning a dish: “Appreciation isn’t all. There must be discrimination too.” She recognizes the palpitating intensity of Olivia’s fascination with her…but even love must be educated.
A field trip to Paris takes Olivia not only to the Louvre, but to a teashop where Mlle. Julie points out a young woman: “In one week, she lost her husband and three children to diphtheria. A few months later, she married her husband’s best friend. You see, in life, some consolation is always there.” But ultimately, Mlle. Julie’s discrimination turns into a renunciation that Olivia resents: despite a heated promise in the excitement of the costume ball, she does not come to Olivia’s room that night.
When Mlle. Julie’s composure is shattered by the death of her partner, Mlle. Cara—“the only person I ever loved”—Olivia holds her own vigil outside the room where Mlle. Julie is sitting wake. Mlle. Julie finds her, brings the shivering girl in, holds her head when she vomits at the sight of the body, wraps her in shawls and leaves word she is to sleep late, the older woman reclaiming her role as comforter.
The school is broken up in the aftermath of death. Mlle. Julie says farewell to the girls individually, bestowing on each a book from her cherished library. Olivia receives what she perceives as a woundingly impersonal gift—Mlle. Julie’s ivory paper-cutter, relinquished like Prospero’s staff. Olivia hurls it away, as though refusing to grow up. The invulnerable, majestic child goes her way. The last shot of the film is again the coach carrying her, disappearing into the trees, its bells again tinkling. The round is complete.
AUDRY’s Les Petits Matins (1962) is, at first glance, a complete contrast to Olivia. (During the opening credits, feel free to twist to the yéyé stylings of Aznavour.) Not a period piece, but contemporary; no lush Cinéma de Qualité production design, but Nouvelle Vagueish locations; no bustles and corsets, but T-shirts and jeans; not a sheltered upper-class schoolgirl, but a working girl, an 18-year-old secretary hitching from drizzly Belgium to the Riviera beaches of Bardot and Sagan; not the round of the school, but the linearity of a road movie.
And yet the little hitchhiker Agathe (Agathe Aëms—in her only film), shares with Olivia the quality of floating in an impermeable bubble of youth, the slight callousness of “I shall probably not die there.”
As though to console an audience that might miss the embarrassment of riches provided by Olivia’s sets and costumes, Les Petits Matins features an almost comical abundance of French cinema stars (Arletty! Blier! Brasseur! Gélin! Hossein!) to shelter, woo, and/or menace the protagonist. She coolly evaluates, profits from, or rejects her pickups, musing in voiceover.
We are slightly shocked and disappointed when she wonders of Jean-Claude Brialy: “Could this be my Prince Charming?” Was that her destination, after all? (He’s a brush salesman! He wants to marry her! And take her home to drizzly old Lille!)
Yet the closing shot of the film shows her alone in the sun, swimming out from the shore…
Tickets for this most unusual (but, as Phoebe notes, intriguingly linked) double bill can be purchased here. The films feature oddly endearing actresses in the “ingenue” roles whose careers were microscopic, but who will stay with you long after they’ve taken their leave from the screen. Join us on April 2nd so that they can work their offbeat magic and get under your skin…
Most notably by Jacqueline Audry’s biographer, Brigitte Rollet, in Olivia: Une Oeuvre Constellation (Cassaniouze, France: ÉrosOnyx Éditions, 2022).