Una donna libera

Françoise Christophe is a middle-class girl with her life all planned. She has just taken her degree in architecture. She is to marry her fiancee after two years. Then she meets conductor Pierre Cressoy. He tells her she is a free woman who may do as she decides. She begins an affair with him, but soon he leaves her to go on a concert tour.

Fine performances and the constant theme of Tschaikovski fill this potboiler of a movie about a woman who comes to realize that we are never free from our pasts. It's a movie whose ending I could not have predicted until almost the last minute, but seems utterly unsurprising as it happens. It's clearly a lush and loving production under the direction of prolific director Vittorio Cottafavi. It falls under the genre that I call "suffering in mink": well done, but uninteresting to me.