Typically she never promoted herself as such, and consequently seems to have slipped through the cracks of history. But nonetheless Hunt-Ehlich succeeds in raising the profile of this astonishing anti-colonial activist who blazed a trail for feminism during the early part of the twentieth century. As it reels from one abuse scandal to another the last thing the Catholic Church needs right now is the timely revival of this reminder of the sheer relentless boredom and awfulness of convent life over two hundred years earlier, into which young women were often cast for financial rather than spiritual reasons.
Especially as we now know the church was still pursuing its abuse of the vulnerable even as it waged a furious campaign to censor this film on its initial appearance back in the sixties. Elisabeth de Raincy, the French President, has decided to withdraw from political life. They have three days to change the course of History. He is Monsieur Hoffmann a popular and talented jeweller with a live-in corner atelier in Montmartre when the Germans move into Paris in setting in motion a mass exodus of Jews and the rounding up of those unable to get away.
Seeing a chance to escape and save his business, by transferring it to his crippled and it soon turns out impotent assistant Francois Mercier Lellouche , he sends his wife and family to the country, but is unable to get away in time and is forced back to take refuge in the basement of his former home, now occupied by Mercier and his mousy wife Blanche a subtle Sara Giraudeau.
A huge, stuffed horse dominates the bedroom, a metaphor for the absurdity of their marital life. At school Antoine is the scapegoat of an obnoxious French teacher Decomble who regularly picks on him. Later Antoine is transferred to a juvenile detention centre, where he absconds during a football match — eventually ending up on the beach — his dream of freedom comes true.
Black-and-white images are for once not poetic nor illuminating, just simply bland — ugly even. His debut would be his masterpiece.
