La Dentelliere = the Lacemaker

Pomme works as a hairdresser and lives with her protective mother in Paris. She goes on a holiday to the seaside town of Cabourg with a more worldly friend. There she forms a relationship with Francois, a young student, and they decide to live together in Paris. Social differences soon emerge. While Francois is garrulously intellectual, Pomme is reserved, incapable of communicating with Francois and his friends but maintaining a mysterious inner radiance. Goretta has described his film as ‘a genre painting’ in narrative form and it is constructed in a series of brief fragmentary scenes which form a picture without evident narrative connections. With its narrative ellipses - eloquent silences and observation of Pomme’s mysterious inner life - Goretta’s film resembles Bresson’s ‘Une Femme Douce’. Also available on VH.

Credits: Producers, Yves Peyrot, Yves Gasser ; director, Claude Goretta ; writers, Claude Goretta, Pascal Laine ; photography, Jean Boffety ; music, Pierre Jansen.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Yves Beneyton, Florence Giorgetti, Anne-Marie Duringer, Michel de Re, Monique Chaumette.