Jacqueline Audry is France's Ida Lupino:she was a director when women were only meant to be actresses,film editors or script girls.Her work begins to surface again,but really little by little.Some critics said that the laurels Agnès Varda won were actually Jacqueline Audry's .
She had only one subject: woman.But who could do it better than a woman? She was probably the first artist to cast a lesbian as a lead (in Jean-Paul Sartre's "huis clos",all the same!);just before "les petits matins" ,she made "le secret du chevalier d'Eon" which cast Andrée Debar as a woman dressed up as a man."Les petits matins" is a story of eighteen-year old Agathe with a firm independence of men even if she uses them to get to the côte d'azur.Along the way she meets a lot of people-because it's finally a road movie-,mostly men ,whom the director does not spare :the macho proud of their brand new car,the forty-something who wants to take Agathe home,the strange handsome guy (Robert Hossein)under his mother 's thumb -a spoof on Hitchcock's characters?-.This is very light stuff,nothing intellectual ,but often charming and there's a bevy of famous actors:Jean -Claude Brialy,Claude Rich,Lino Ventura,François Perrier,Pierre Brasseur,and the couple Bernard Blier/Arletty who team up for the first time since Marcel Carné's "Hôtel du Nord" (1938).Plus two singers ,the first of whom plays but does not sing (Gilbert Becaud who wrote "let it be me" and "what now my love?"),the second sings the title song but does not play.(Charles Aznavour)
Agathe Aems who plays the lead never made another movie before or since.
