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THE GIRL Send This Review to a Friend
The opening credits begin with cigarette smoke curling upwards and seductive jazz playing softly, and that smoky, sexy mood prevails throughout Sande Zeig's perfectly controlled film set in Paris. It could be the kind of film noir in which a Bogart saunters into a bar and is smitten by a torch singer. Only in Zeig's scheme of things, it is a woman who enters the bar and is smitten by the irresistible dame.
Agatha de la Boulaye, a painter, develops a compulsion over "The Girl," played by Claire Keim after the singer takes her to her apartment, where they make love in what is supposed to be a one-night stand. Boulaye narrates the saga of the fitful relationship that develops. As played by Keim, The Girl is self-centered and continues to see her enamoured lover only when it suits her mood, while the painter endures the rejections because she increasingly hungers for her new amour. There's a complication. The singer is also involved with a man (Cyril Lecomte), who controls the club, wields ominous power over those who work for him and has a vicious bodyguard (Cyrille Hertel).
The painter, soon in a dangerous situation, gets comfort and unflinching loyalty from her woman friend, Bu Save, played by Sandra N'Kake, even though she knows of the affair. But getting mixed up with The Girl is life-threatening. The painter takes some severe beatings, but in a film more geared to mood than realism, she keeps showing up hardly the worse for wear, much as Hollywood's noir male heroes could have the daylights knocked out of them yet hardly show a scratch.
Zeig, who co-wrote the screenplay with Monique Wittig based on a story by Wittig, keeps an effectively tight rein over the mood she works to establish, and the undercurrent of the score is a major help. The film has the effect of taking one into a strange world, not strange because of lesbian love, but because the characters and the location seem to exist disembodied from everything and everywhere else.
I found a problem with the sound in parts, making it difficult to understand all of the singer's dialogue when spoken softly. Otherwise, the film is attractively photographed and convincingly acted. It has the power to draw one into this milieu in which feelings for one another are severely tested, people can both taste freedom and run risks and obsessions can have unexpected consequences. An Artistic License Films release.
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