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The all-girls boarding school is from Mädchen in Uniform, variously referred to as "prison" and "fortress" and "museum" and ultimately remembered as the cemetery of a first love. Collège du Lys, Therese (Essy Persson) returns to it middle-aged and doleful, the cavernous halls were once the backdrop for illicit romance. Faux-Resnais temporal shifts to go with faux-Resnais tracking shots, suddenly she's a student locked in the lavatory with her spirited classmate Isabelle (Anna Gael). High-angled views of the campus lend a cold geometry promptly warmed by the rush of carnal intoxication—the touch takes place in a grand staircase, the camera tilts up from eager fingertips to take in Gael's Deneuveish opulence in close-up as Baudelaire's incantatory words are recited ("luxurious... languorous... sensuous... voluptuous..."). The stepfather, the café lothario, the nude statue giggled at, thus the male sex for two lasses much more interested in different "bad habits." Adroitly amalgamating various stands of Euro-arthouse chic (the modalities also include Antonioni and Malle), Radley Metzger creates an atmosphere of melancholy rapture, of a forlorn present intruding upon recalled ecstasy. The heroine's tremulous deflowering on a bed of leaves is rhymed later with her forest romp with her friend in the wake of a botched day together in the city, her onanistic interlude is a pantomime performance given monumental long-take widescreen plus a Georges Auric score. Lovemaking as a reflection in a bulging mirror, the better for Violette Leduc's extravagant prose to take over: "I was a violinist caressing a bow... Our mouths met in an accommodating dream... I felt stigmata open my entrails." Aldrich's concurrent The Killing of Sister George pours acid into the perfume. With Barbara Laage, Maurice Teynac, Anne Vernon, Rémy Longa, and Simone Paris. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |