Word: goretta
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...talks with animation and the slightest of accents. Yes, she says, the similarity in the endings of Violette and The Lacemaker was intentional; it was Chabrol's way of tipping his hat to Claude Goretta, the director of the earlier film. But she notes that the endings are only the same "for the camera - visually. For Violette, you know, the ending is open; there are chances for her. For Beatrice in The Lacemaker, it is closed, without the possibility of hope." In a way, she goes on, the two films are about young women and authority, one struggling...
...unusually firm idea of what she wants to do with her career. She has just finished playing Anne, the youngest Bronte, in Andre Techine's The Bronte Sisters. She prefers directors who let actors work out their own interpretations. This list includes Goretta and Chabrol but not the notoriously tyrannical Otto Preminger, for whom she played a part in Rosebud, his not very successful film of a few years ago. "He yelled so much," she recalls...
When Pomme breaks up with Francois, the mood shifts. Having stressed her childlike vulnerability, Goretta has no way to work out an ending that will allow Pomme to survive. The logical solution would have Pomme go her own way, a little wiser and stronger--but then her innocence would be lost. Instead, Goretta chooses to preserve that innocence in a sanitarium. Our last view of Pomme shows her staring into the camera with the look of a child who has been hurt deeply--too deeply to ever forget...
...Pomme isn't a child, and she certainly isn't the kind of wild-eyed romantic that Isabelle Adjani played in The Story of Adele H. And even children survive hurt--why can't Pomme? Goretta, trying to give his heroine some womanly depth without taking away her innocence, creates a victim whose suffering can't be believed...
...indecisive portrayal of Francois presents another problem for Goretta. He is introduced to us almost as a joke--emaciated, announcing to Pomme that he is a "brilliant student," he is practically a caricature of an intellectual. When Francois brings Pomme to a party, he listens attentively to a friend describe the current era as "the age of the box." Pomme looks bewildered, but it's unclear whether the narrative aims at showing her as intellectually inadequate or merely unable to swallow the crap. Given this ambivalent attitude about Francois, it's difficult to feel a deep sense of loss when...