Olivia

OLIVIA is a remarkable work by one of France’s first groundbreaking female filmmakers, Jacqueline Audry. The film easily merits rediscovery today after being neglected for almost 70 years.

Plunging the viewer – and the main character – into a true lion’s den, Audry depicts a 19th century boarding school for young girls, one divided into two camps where all the shots, even the most underhanded, seem allowed. The two mistresses of the house, Miss Julie and Miss Cara, are engaged in a true turf war, and a war of the heart. Competing for the affections of their students, they rouse passion, hatred and unexpected reversals of loyalties.

OLIVIA does not address female homosexuality directly, and the director passes no judgment on her characters, but instead explores the students’ discovery of love and attraction, and the awakening of their senses. Only the two temptresses, Julie and Cara, are presented as manipulative, and power seems to animate them as much as suppressed carnal desire.

Shutting away its actors in a somber, gothic space, Audry orchestrates a flow of people around the boarding school’s staircase: a circular space from which the teens observe others, and the hallways, waiting rooms, and vestibules of the building, which evoke a fairytale castle. It instills a mood of strangeness that borders on the fantastic.