FRENCH PROVINCIAL Movie Review

Souvenirs d'en France

Former film critic André Téchiné was yet another of the gifted Cahiers du Cinéma set who decided to put his money where his mouth is, and the result was this striking if maddeningly disjointed portrait of a seamstress (Jeanne Moreau) who marries into a bourgeois family and works her way to the top. The movie's conceived as a kind of supersoaper—an ungainly blend of Rules of the Game and Dallas, with a dash of Pagnol thrown in—but it's Téchiné's audacious, lilting sense of style that rides to the rescue. There are lovely passages of such visual ingenuity that the already convoluted narrative takes a backseat, and we can simply luxuriate in the rich, fluid images of Bruno Nuytten (who later would photograph the Pagnol-inspired Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, and, less successfully, would direct Camille Claudel). With Marie-France Pisier and Orane Demazis (of Pagnol's Harvest and The Fanny Trilogy).

NEXT STOP … Wild Reeds, Ma Saison Préférée, The Marriage of Maria Braun

1975 95m/C FR Jeanne Moreau, Michel Auclair, Marie-France Pisier, Orane Demazis, Claude Mann, Julien Guiomar, Michele Moretti, Aram Stephane; D: Andre Techine; W: Andre Techine, Marilyn Goldin; C: Bruno Nuytten; M: Philippe Sarde. NYR