Word: lena
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...elementary school play in Lyon in 1952. Unlike Personal Best, where the relationship between the two women is distinctly physical and the film The Turning Point, where the women share a strictly platonic relationship. Kury does not explicate the nature of the protagonists' relationship, but rather leaves Madeline and Lena's friendship ambiguous...
Their first meeting, however, hints at a decidely physical attraction. As they sit together on a bench in the empty school auditorium. Lena suddenly reaches down to touch her leg, noticing that she has ripped her stocking. Looking at Madeline's bare legs she quips, "You're bare-legged." Madeline explains that she is wearing suntan lotion, and rubs her leg, asking Lena to smell her hand. In this first meeting of two soon to be friends the viewer wonders why Kury has chosen to initiate their friendship with such a decisively physical scene...
...this rather intimate moment also describes one of the compelling forces in the two women's close friendship. Madeline is, in a sense, the bare legged or liberated of the two, while Lena is enveloped in the world of domesticity; a world which Made line begins to show her is limiting and stifling...
...film opens as Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a Belgian Jew and character based on Kury's mother, enters a detention camp during WWII. She is allowed to leave by agreeing to marry Michel, also a Jew (Guy Machard). Together they escape to Italy. At the same time in German occupied France, Madeline (Miou-Miou) weds a fellow art student who soon after is murdered by the Nazis...
Huppert, too often the ice maiden of French movies (The Lacemaker, Loulou), merges sugar and steel to embody the superior, frustrated Lena. In her face and gestures, Miou Miou finds reasons for each of Madeleine's enigmatic quirks...