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La Ravisseuse
2005 Drama / Historical
Review
With its suitably moody photography and design (which is
strangely evocative of the novels of the Brontë sisters), La Ravisseuse offers a poignant
account of the fate of many young women in bygone times – girls who
were compelled to abandon their own new-born children so that they
could work as nurses for the better off. It’s the second
full-length film from the promising new director Antoine Santana, and
stars the captivating Isild Le Besco, a talented young actress blessed
with an almost unreal Pre-Raphaelite beauty (which serves this film
particularly well). Le Besco featured in Santana’s previous film
Un moment de bonheur
(2002). The film’s atmospheric sombre-toned cinematography and claustrophobic period sets are more successful at suggesting the tension between the three main characters than the insubstantial screenplay, although the performances – particularly those of Le Besco and Émilie Dequenne – effectively convey the tragedy and bleak injustice of Angèle-Marie’s situation. What most prevents the film from being a conventional period drama are its bizarre excursions into Cocteau-like surrealism, sequences which portray the mental flights of fancy of the protagonists. The most striking of these is a haunting male masturbatory fantasy, an imaginative example of "art erotica" which tacitly underscores the main theme of the film, the brutal subjugation of women. © James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film...User Comments
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Director:
Antoine Santana
Starring: Isild Le Besco, Émilie Dequenne, Grégoire Colin, Anémone, Frédéric Pierrot Synopsis
1870s France. An 18-year-old nurse, Angèle-Marie, is hired
to take care of the newly born baby of a young bourgeois couple, Julien
et Charlotte Orcus. Since giving birth, Charlotte has been unable
to sleep with her husband, so he naturally finds himself drawn to the
attractive young nurse. Unaware of this, Charlotte begins to
regard Angèle-Marie as a friend, and the latter reveals that
before accepting the position as a nurse, she had just given birth
herself...
Credits
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