Between the French silent age and the coming of Agnès Varda , the importance of Jacqueline Audry cannot be overstated :she was the very first woman director and her best works (notably "Olivia" which broached the lesbian subject, "la garçonne" and her excellent adaptation of Sartre's "Huis Clos") should have been considered classics of the fifties ,had the cinema of the era been less macho.
The early seventies found Audry lost in Sardinia ,to be precise in Rohmer's navel-gazing. The prologue, very violent , deals with the heroine's childhood trauma .But the rest is insignificant :its subject was already passé in 1971 and the girl does not look like ,to the slightest extent, a neurotic girl traumatized by the horrible events of her awful past ;she sets her heart on a native in order to lose her virginity :this extremely original plot sees her wander in the island before taking the plunge ; she makes the young lad wait , going as far as to paint her body in gold,a la "Goldfinger" .
Carole André and co-star athletic Christine "Kiki " Caron ( a swimming champion in the sixties,silver medal in Tokyo Olympic games 1964) give monotonous and even irritating performances. It was to be Audry's last effort.
A young person who would like to discover Audry' s work should go back to her fifties works.
