Word: goretta
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POMME, THE HEROINE of Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker, has a face you might pass a hundred times without noticing, only to discover on the hundredth-and-first passing that it is indeed beautiful. Simple in feature and freckled, the face must be studied carefully before you begin to discern a hesitant glimmer in the eye and a warmth in the smile. You could call it childlike, but there is a certain melancholy under the surface...
...action of Goretta's film begins when Marilyn takes Pomme to Normandy for a holiday. Marilyn soon moves in with an American tourist, while Pomme, left at home, meets Francois (Yves Beneyton), a Parisian student, and falls in love with him. Together, they go back to Paris and rent an apartment. Finding Pomme unable to meet his intellectual demands, Francois soon becomes bored with her, and they ultimately break up. Pomme suffers a nervous breakdown and enters a sanitarium...
...believe a capacity for hurt in Pomme so extreme that it will send her to a sanitarium. When Francois and Pomme break up, you can see she has already begun to become restless, yet her down-to-earth resilience unaccountably fails her. Why, in the last fifteen minutes, must Goretta turn his lighthearted film into something as heavy as The Story of Adele...
...answer might lie in the fact that the primary virtue of the film--its celebration of innocence--also presents something of a drawback to the filmmaker; until the romance starts to go awry, there's not much to The Lacemaker. Goretta has established the mood through a number of endearing images: Pomme running to the salon with three melting ice cream cones, trying to keep them from dripping; Pomme interrupting a walk on the beach to brush off a sea shell; Pomme, still a virgin, lying nude in bed, her nightgown spread over the covers...
...ignorance, and, lest we make the same error, the movie ends with the damaged and deserted Pomme staring accusingly at the audience. It is a devastating denouement?the kind we expect from heartbreak movies ?but it is not pity for the proverbial jilted heroine that is disturbing. What Goretta forces us to confront at the end of The Lacemaker is the potential for inhumanity within ourselves. ? Frank Rich