La puritaine

ooh, i feel so bad dissing this film because the director, Jacques doillon, gave me one of my the very favorite film experiences of my life, with Ponette. well, this film was made a decade before ponette and i saw it tonight in a 'doillon week'at the brattle theater in Cambridge mass. exc. acting but a script with a crucial 'revelation' that was so stupid and obtuse that all the patient waiting through the artsy 'what went before' felt completely wasted once the film reached this point. a 19 yr old girl has left her father(a theater director) and home, disappeared for a year without explanation, and now returns to see him. a lot of histrionics for nothing. perhaps it was done more tongue-in-cheek than i realized, or perhaps there was a sophisticated message referring to 20th c. French drama; if so, i obviously missed those messages.