La Clé sur la porte (1978)
Directed by Yves Boisset

Film Review

Yves Boisset is a director best known for his glacial thrillers (Folle à tuer, Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shériff) and provocative political dramas (L'Attentat, R.A.S.).  La Clé sur la porte reveals an altogether different side to Boisset, less truculent, more in tune with contemporary themes, such as women and young people finding their place in society.  Based on a best-selling novel by Marie Cardinal, adapted by the journalist-turned-director André Weinfeld, the film is loosely plotted and consists of a series of slice-of-life vignettes in which the central protagonist, a middle-aged schoolteacher played by a magnificent Annie Girardot, compensates for her own strict upbringing by allowing others the freedom she never had.  The key is always in her door, both literally and figuratively, but the warmth of her almost invariably good-natured interactions with others does not hide the fact that she is a lonely and damaged individual.

Opposite Girardot, Boisset cast another icon of 1970s French cinema, Patrick Dewaere, with whom he had recently worked on Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shériff.  It is the unlikeliest of romantic pairings but, more than anything, this is what makes the film so humane and touching.  Outwardly Girardot and Dewaere's characters are so different but inwardly they share the same fragility and restlessness, and together they find meaning in their lives through the special alchemy of love.  Boisset's film anticipates Claude Pinoteau's La Boum (1980) with its honest engagement with the problems of young people being forced to grow up too quickly in modern day France.  The warmest and most naturalistic of Yves Boisset's films, La Clé sur la porte manages to evoke both the disillusionment of one generation of French people following the events of May 1968 and the anxieties of the next generation facing a very uncertain future.  It was to be one of Boisset's biggest successes at the French box office, attracting an audience of 1.9 million.

Film Synopsis

Marie is a progressive teacher in a French high school.  Since her husband left her to start a new life in Canada, she has had to bring up her three children alone.  One evening, during a party with her pupils, Marie comes to the aid of a young man who has been beaten up by yobs in the basement of the building where she lives.  The stranger is badly injured so Marie calls on the services of Philippe. a doctor.  Marie and Philippe are instantly attracted towards one another.  Then, a young delinquent named Laurent joins Marie's class and begins to exert an unwelcome influence over the teacher's eldest daughter...