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| Bernadette Lafont's allure brings a village to its knees in A VERY CURIOUS GIRL. |
Once again, was lured in by Criterion Channel fare that kept me up very late, namely A VERY CURIOUS GIRL (1969), an inadequate retitling of Nelly Kaplan’s debut feature LA FIANCÉE DU PIRATE. Any attempt to describe this film will make it sound like an long misfiled, overlooked work of folk horror, but it’s more of a surreal, satirical fable of sexual politics wherein the horror element is visible only through the eyes of its foolish, hysterical supporting cast.
The story is set in a little village in rural France where the puritanism of the hypocritical locals has ostracized an old woman (a former prostitute) to a wretched shack out in the woods, where she lives with her grown daughter Marie (who works as a servant to the landowner) and their pet, a very Black Peter-like goat whom the vaguely witchy daughter Marie (played by the supremely alluring and sassy Bernadette Lafont) tends and talks to like a lover. When the old woman dies and the goat is killed, Marie quits her job and sets about rejuvenating the family business, whoring out of the shack, which her income from the men of the village (and several just passing through) gradually equips with most modern conveniences, presents, and new wardrobe options. Had the movie started out with a witchier Marie swearing to avenge her mother and goat by placing a curse on the townsfolk, the story would not be conspicuously changed. Instead, what we get here is a broad, ticklish exposé of how civilization, piety, and morality are mostly false constructs of the patriarchy, dedicated to controlling, containing, and owning the enormous sexual power all women are born with - which is proved again and again as mayor, grocer, and abbé alike try in vain to make Marie his own. A bizarre and vastly entertaining movie, as well as a defiant feminist statement from cinema’s most revolutionary era.
Isn’t this a lovely Polish poster I found?
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