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 is 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).
Over the past few decades, Santana has worked as an assistant to Benoît Jacquot
on several of his films, including
L'École de la chair (1998),
Les Adieux à la reine (2012)
and Journal d'une femme de chambre (2015).
The film's atmospheric sombre 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.
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Film 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...