La dentellière

The student from Paris and his friends are intellectuals. He reads Le Monde. He is stamped by his background. The girl is in love with love. Everywhere she turns, there is love and passion evident, even through the hotel's thin walls. She only wishes to please and outwardly doesn't project herself as a self-regulated person. Her lower class background is clear before she goes on vacation where she meets the student. Although they stay in the same hotel, this is about the only thing they have in common beside the bed they share, but being removed from their normal lives just delays the obvious. Love is idyllic at first for everyone. She is hopelessly adrift among his friends in Paris and cannot communicate with them. This class based depiction is consistent with how many French view that one's birth divides a person from the other classes.

The class-based system exists here in the South, but I have a feeling that passion and love and familiarity more readily breaks down barriers than those 30 years ago in France.

This is a movie well worth seeing.

What can I say about this movie? It reduced me to tears in 1977, and again in 2003. It doesn't stand up to over analysis, but it rings so absolutely true... which has given the film it's resonance down the years. Isabelle Huppert's performance is sublime, and the last scene one of the most heartbreaking in cinema.

Beatrice is a very reserved and quiet young woman. Her friend Marylene is left by her lover and brings her to Cabourg (Normandy) for a few days' vacation. There, Beatrice, an apprentice hairdresser, meets Francois, a middle-class intellectual. Francois becomes her first lover, but their social and cultural differences get in the way of happiness.

This film is highly praised and indeed it is a pretty good film. Not my favorite, not one I am likely to recommend to others, but a fine film just the same. What I liked most is that the movie says it is okay to be an introvert, to be a wallflower, to be a loner. Other movies might have a shy kid breaking out of their shell, but here we have Beatrice who knows who she is and is (for the most part) very comfortable about it.

There is something very beautiful about it though I feel I can't just put my finger on it but it is super simple yet super effective and impacting movie and performance especially by Isabelle Huppert...she is so vulnerable, simple, sad and natural...

Who knows why we retain the memory of some films and others remain a forgotten blip. "The Lacemaker" stayed with me over the years. I thought Isabelle Huppert played a marvelous part, and the story line fascinated me. I can still feel the sadness of her character when she was rejected by her lover, and then paid the price for her addiction to him. Films like "Blade Runner," "Murmur of the Heart," "Experience Preferred but not Essential, " The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Closely Watched Trains," and a host of other good films will always be special to me, but not as endearing as "La Dentelliere."