Lady J

Madame de La Pommeraye, a young widow withdrawn from the world, gives in to the court of the Marquis des Arcis, a notorious libertine. After a few years of unfailing happiness, she discovers that the marquis has grown weary of their union. Madly in love and terribly wounded, she decides to take revenge on him with the complicity of Mademoiselle de Joncquières and her mother...

Light, sometimes too light, Emmanuel Mouret ("Let Lucie do it", "Un Baiser, s'il vous plaît") long favored (if not followed the easy route) of burlesque marivaudage. When he tried his hand at pure melodrama ("Une autre vie"), he was not really convincing. But with "Mademoiselle de Joncquières ", he seems to have found the ideal formula, namely sprinkling lightness on an underlying layer of gravity and cruelty. Diderot (from whom he here adapts an episode of "Jacques le fataliste") and the 18th century undoubtedly inspire him: subtle dialogues, deep but never sententious considerations, superb costumes, natural and interior settings. Ans his actors as well : Cécile de France, elegant and acidulous, and Édouard Baer, deceitfully languid and detached, are the perfect embodiment of this couple living what I would call their "well-mannered passion": they excel in a double game, all the more fascinating as it remains unexpressed verbally. It looks as if they wear velvet gloves with hidden points. Alongside them, two other performers shine, Alice Isaaz, as the candid and virginal Mademoiselle de Joncquières and the vivacious Laure Calamy playing a rather perfidious friend of Madame de la Pommeraye. Note that the subject had already been treated by Robert Bresson in "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne", in a very different style.