Not about a lacemaker but an apprentice beautician, this sentimental tragedy is quite perceptive, if also rather inconsequential and narrowly focussed, in its observation of the various discomforts that arise from such social crises as when one's roommate strips naked in the public streets, the noises of lovemaking filter loud and clear through paper-thin walls, a chicken bone gets lodged in the throat at dinner, and highfalutin vocabulary words like "dialectic" and "phonemes" crop up in the course of casual conversation. The butterfly-fragile heroine is played by Isabelle Huppert, who has an almost galactic cluster of freckles on her face and a charming, rodenty way of munching on fresh fruit and ice cream, and who, for those reasons and others, has caused film critics all across the land to fall head over heels in love with her. But there is nonetheless something suffocating about her and her director, Claude Goretta's, efforts to beguile, bluff, and bulldog the viewer into a state of paternal fretting over the fate of this girl. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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