Customer Reviews

The Lacemaker [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm giving a 5-star rating for this reason: I saw this film one time close to 30 years ago and I have never forgotten it. I've forgotten details, of course, but the beauty and the emotional intensity have stayed with me. I'm so happy to find that it's available on video. Now I'll not only see it again but own it. In my memory, the boyfriend and his college friends loved to sit around smoking and talking in abstract terms about truth and beauty. The boyfriend hoped to bring this naive, ignorant girl along to some greater intellectual understanding of such high-flown concepts so that she would fit into his circle and not embarrass him with her intellectual weakness. The irony was that the girl was herself the personification of truth and beauty, serving him and his friends food and drink with Zen-like care, making love to him, listening to him, creating simple, aesthetic pleasures. The intellectually arrogant and condescending college student was so blinded by his own ego that he failed to see her for what she was and cast her aside. This is how I remember the story, anyway, from so many years ago.

I understand that this is the film that brought Isabelle Huppert, already the accomplished veteran of over 20 films and yet just 22-years-old, to the forefront of the French cinema. It is not hard to see why. She is apple sweet in her red hair and freckles and her pretty face and her cute little figure playing Pomme, a Parisian apprentice hairdresser. She is shy about sex and modest--just an ordinary French girl who hopes one day to be a beautician. Along comes François (Yves Beneyton) a tall, handsome, young intellectual from a petite bourgeois family who sweeps her off her feet.

They set up housekeeping and eventually he gets around to introducing her to his family. Alas, Mom finds the girl "decent," and ...well, it's rather predictable. You should watch. I've seen the story a number of times, and I find it rather painful, especially because in this case Huppert is so incredibly sweet and adorable. It is a naturalistic love story, like something from a nineteenth century novel, sad, compelling, bittersweet and ultimately tragic in an all too familiar way.

Claude Goretta's direction is lean and finely cut, and he does a great job with Huppert. There are moments of pure genius, especially the stunning final shot in which Pomme suddenly turns to the camera, on her face a vaguely hopeful, enigmatic expression. It lingers just long enough so that we realize this really is the end, and the lights are about to come up. The shot is especially effective because we can see the posters from Greece on the walls that reveal that what she just told François was a kind of proud make-believe story. Also very well done without undue emphasis is the scene where Pomme goes to him at the window in their apartment, presenting herself to him, so to speak, her naked little self so vulnerable, and he is not interested. Nothing more need to be said. It is like the turn in a sonnet: everything changes.

Without the beguiling child-like, but deeply experienced and finely expressed performance by Mademoiselle Huppert, this film would still be good, but nothing special. She carries the film: her timing, her intense concentration, her sense of who she is and how she feels at every moment is just perfect. She is exquisite.

For those of you familiar with the work of Isabelle Huppert, this is a film not to be missed.

Huppert does a wonderful portrayal of an inarticulate beauty who falls in love with a law student. Inevitably their affair ends unhappily. Good supporting performances by her mother and best friend. I like very few romantic movies, but I saw this one 4 times and still remember it after 20 years.

I saw The Lacemaker many years ago and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It had a heart breaking quality and a depth of intimacy into the human soul that made it unforgetable. The delicacy of her spirit which opened her to attack, either deliberate or inadvertent,by the callousness of a lover rang true for me and many who once believed in true love. Anyone who doesn't mind a good jab at the soul should by all means see it.

One of my favourite films of all time, I have seen La Dentelliere in its original French version in a Paris cinema and dubbed on TV and video in the UK. It is a Very French film, with long passages of deep conversation and concentrates on carefully developing each character - so much so that we really care about Pomme's happiness and ultimate despair. The clifftop scene is a particular favourite where Pomme walks with her eyes closed to the very edge displaying her total trust in her lover.

And the masterful acting of Isabelle Huppert - a truly gamine Francaise - in the heartbreaking final scene drives into your very soul.

This is a fine film of its type, an almost unbearablely sad film about a young woman's achievement of happiness; and how, because of her own inadequacies, she is unable to hold on to it

Pomme, played by Isabelle Huppert, is a sweet, innocent and docile young woman who is an apprentice hairdresser. She goes on holiday to the sea-side with her employer, Marylene, played by Florence Giorgetti, a sexually voracious and vastly experienced older woman who, having just been dumped by her lover of three years, is on the look-out for someone to fill the void. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take her long to find someone, at which point she selfishly abandons Pomme, leaving her alone and lonely.

But a pretty girl cannot remain alone for long at the sea-side in France - one wonders how she managed to remain alone for so long in Paris - and soon there comes along Francois, played by Yves Beneyton, a very tall and very thin young man, who, physically, is no answer to any girl's dream. But he is a student and he talks well, though he has difficulty getting her to talk at all. Her extreme reticence is puzzling - and unrealistic. She may be your relatively uneducated, average girl, but most average girls in my experience are capable of asking the usual and obvious questions and showing an interest in the man they are with. However, she is otherwise so lovable, so pretty, sweet and tractable that he is willing to overlook her deficiencies, thinking he can change her, that all she needs is a little education to make her and their relationship perfect. He tries his best but is eventually disillusioned: she seems to have no desire for self-improvement and no interest in the books he gives her to read. Sadly, but slowly, he comes to realise that, despite all her good qualities, she will never make a suitable wife for the high-flyer he knows himself to be, and being the good man he is, he is racked with guilt that he should have so cruelly raised her expectations. With a heavy heart he breaks the news to her and she, poor girl, tractable as always, just walks away without a word of complaint.

But, in truth, her happiness has been shattered, her hopes for the future destroyed. She goes into a decline, refuses to eat, and ends up in a dreadful sanatorium.

There, years later, he visits her and they walk in the garden reminiscing about their former happy times together. And then, when he leaves, she walks back down the long bleak corridor to continue with her knitting and her dreary pointless existence. ... .

** A most delightful scene of Full frontal Female Nudity.

** Even though Isabelle Huppert was somewhat overweight.

** She had not shaved off each & every one of her pubic hairs.

** She did not emulate the actress in Jean -Luc Goddard's "NUMEROUS DEUX", who lay on the marriage bed, stark naked.

** And masturbated.

** Before hubby burst into the bedroom & exclaimed, "what are you doing?"