Delicate Lacework

Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker addresses itself to little things—greatly. The movie is simple enough; the script, by Goretta and Pascal Lainé, is based on the latter’s novel. Béatrice, nicknamed Pomme, is an 18-year-old apprentice in a Paris beauty parlor. She is a shy girl, friendly yet passive, not unlike her mother, whose husband took off when Pomme was a child. A credit sequence, with the camera tracking and panning, shows the shop’s activities as sufficient for this unassuming innocent. Her best friend, Marilyn, is a rather too experienced young woman about to be dumped by her married lover. The scene in which she is on the phone with him for the last time is a triumph of psychological observation translated into movement even more than dialogue, with camera placement and editing superlatively conveying Pomme’s quiet bewilderment at a world whose harmfulness she cannot comprehend, let alone mitigate.

Marilyn and Pomme go off to Cabourg late in the season, somewhere in between the smart set and the desolation. The weather is bad, the place and people disconcerting. Still, Pomme perks up until Marilyn leaves to move in with an American. Pomme is enveloped in a seamless loneliness. The boredom of a miscarried vacation has never been better rendered than in a series of very short scenes here that suggest, against diverse backgrounds, the same stunned isolation. Then François, a literature student from the Sorbonne, who comes here only because his parents live nearby, talks to Pomme briefly at a café. They part. There is a montage of elegiac scenes in which each of them—he consciously, she unconsciously—searches for the other in vain. They meet again, and very slowly become friends and eventually lovers. With masterly skill, Goretta embeds the seeds of their incompatibility in the very scenes of courtship. They move into a Paris garret apartment together: she continues to work, he to study.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker addresses itself to little things—greatly. The movie is simple enough; the script, by Goretta and Pascal Lainé, is based on the latter’s novel. Béatrice, nicknamed Pomme, is an 18-year-old apprentice in a Paris beauty parlor. She is a shy girl, friendly yet passive, not unlike her mother, whose husband took off when Pomme was a child. A credit sequence, with the camera tracking and panning, shows the shop’s activities as sufficient for this unassuming innocent. Her best friend, Marilyn, is a rather too experienced young woman about to be dumped by her married lover. The scene in which she is on the phone with him for the last time is a triumph of psychological observation translated into movement even more than dialogue, with camera placement and editing superlatively conveying Pomme’s quiet bewilderment at a world whose harmfulness she cannot comprehend, let alone mitigate.

Marilyn and Pomme go off to Cabourg late in the season, somewhere in between the smart set and the desolation. The weather is bad, the place and people disconcerting. Still, Pomme perks up until Marilyn leaves to move in with an American. Pomme is enveloped in a seamless loneliness. The boredom of a miscarried vacation has never been better rendered than in a series of very short scenes here that suggest, against diverse backgrounds, the same stunned isolation. Then François, a literature student from the Sorbonne, who comes here only because his parents live nearby, talks to Pomme briefly at a café. They part. There is a montage of elegiac scenes in which each of them—he consciously, she unconsciously—searches for the other in vain. They meet again, and very slowly become friends and eventually lovers. With masterly skill, Goretta embeds the seeds of their incompatibility in the very scenes of courtship. They move into a Paris garret apartment together: she continues to work, he to study.