Word: goretta
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Surely there are few moviegoers who have not encountered The Lacemaker's kind of misty tragedy at one tune or another, but the film's total impact easily exceeds the sum of its familiar parts. Armed with compassion, tough intelligence and a first-rate cast, Director Claude Goretta (The Wonderful Crook) has performed the rare alchemic stunt of converting a genre picture into art: though The Lacemaker has all the trappings of conventional romantic movies, its deepest?and most upsetting?concerns are purely...
...first Goretta allows us to luxuriate in love's spell for an hour or so, staging a series of tender scenes that describe the tentative, early episodes in Pomme and null idyll. The mood is lyric, and the Normandy air is thick with affection: when the sensitive Frangois takes the virginal Pomme to bed for the first time, we are too caught up in their unaffected eroticism to notice much else. Only after the lovers leave their vacation paradise does Goretta begin to reveal his hand: as null grows bored with the affair, The Lacemaker seamlessly goes from lush romance...
...movie's ideological position soon becomes clear. To Goretta, null rejection of the defenseless Pomme exemplifies the way the rich exploit the working class. But, unlike so many recent ideologically minded films, The Lacemaker never sacrifices the integrity of its characters to its political message. Rather than turn Francois into a snotty villain and Pomme into a peasant saint, Goretta, an eyenhanded Swiss, attacks the system that victimizes them both. The movie's title, with its allusion to 17th century genre paintings, suggests the delicacy of Gor-etta's style...
...Goretta. 47. was previously represented in this country only by The Invitation (1975), a Chekhovian study of a disintegrating office party. In Wonderful Crook, the actors readily grasp the same light-handed spirit. Marlene Jobert as Nelly may be a little too refined for a post office clerk, and Gerard Depardieu as Pierre may be low-keyed to the point of occasional inaudibility: but both, along with Dominique Labourier as the wife, give performances of great charm...
Unluckily, coming so soon after Fun with Dick and Jane (TIME. Feb. 7), the movie runs the risk of being dismissed as another middle-class crime caper. But unlike Dick and Jane. Crook yields to no glibness. no gags, no cheap shots at the System. Goretta's comedy arises from sharp but sympathetic observation of the ways in which ordinary, well-meaning people stumble into one sad mess after another. Christopher Porterfield