LA LECTRICE Movie Review

The Reader

A Raymond Jean novel titled La Lectrice—the story of a woman whose seductive powers blossom when she reads aloud—is taken to heart by Constance (Miou-Miou), who's inspired enough by the book to try reading to her boyfriend in bed. Constance is quite smitten with the novel's premise, and imagines herself as its heroine, offering her services as a professional reader, and serves a varied clientele in a series of surreal, teasing episodes that appear to be part real and part fantasy In the course of the film, Constance reads to a young paraplegic, to a judge whose tastes run to pornography, and to a radical, socialist widow. Director Michel Deville was on to something here—the idea of a woman taking such pleasure in the written word that she gets sexual pleasure from sharing it with others is novel but not absurd, and filled with possibilities. So where are they? La Lectrice entices at first with the idea that it might turn into a literary Klute, but the individual encounters never generate much interest, sympathy, or heat. The comic possibilities are certainly there, as well—the idea isn't all that different from Woody Allen's brilliant comic essay The Whore of Mensa—but Deville avoids flat-out laughs as if they were beneath him. Instead, the movie's just a tease—soft-core intellectual porn, for librarians in raincoats.

NEXT STOP … Diary of a Seducer, Fahrenheit 451, Belle de Jour

1988 (R) 98m/C FR Miou-Miou, Christian Ruche, Sylvie Laporte, Michael Raskine, Brigitte Catillon, Regis Royer, Maria Casares, Pierre Dux, Patrick Chesnais; D: Michel DeVille; W: Rosalinde DeVille, Michel DeVille. Cesar Awards '89: Best Supporting Actor (Chesnais); Montreal World Film Festival '88: Best Film. VHS, LV ORI