Marylene meets an American tourist and moves into his hotel. Pomme, alone, soberly regards the bathers. She eats a plum in her room. She has solitary ice creams in deserted cafes. One day she meets Francois, a literature student from Paris who is also alone at the resort. They shyly like each other but lose track of each other, and Goretta provides a stunning shot showing Francois walking alone on the beach as the camera then rotates to zoom in on Pomme on a side street a few blocks away.
They do eventually meet again, though, and Goretta quietly celebrates the beginnings of their love. Both are quiet and withdrawn. Both are sexually inexperienced. Both are more in love than perhaps they’ll ever be able to articulate. They go back to Paris and take an apartment together after Francois shares an awkward cup of tea with Pomme’s mother (“Just so long as she’s happy…”). But then their relationship grows more complicated, and “The Lacemaker” stops being a love story and starts being a delicate character study.
Because Francois, you see, wants to “improve” Pomme. Thinks she should have a better job than at the beauty parlor. Is proud of her in conversations with his intellectual friends (“She couldn’t go to college, but she has a natural intelligence”). But finds that she has little to contribute when his friends come over for self-conscious discussions about Marxism.
“What do you mean by ‘dialectic’?” she asks him, after one such evening. He’s very attentive and helpful in his answer although it gradually becomes clear to her, and to us, that he has no idea exactly what he means by “dialectic.” She’d never think of pointing that out, though. Instead, she withdraws into herself, becomes very still and silent, and finally acquiesces when he explains why their relationship has to end.
“How did she take it?” one of Francois’ intellectual friends asks.
“Better than I expected,” he says. “She didn’t say anything.” What a rat. But a pathetic rat, because he’s trapped in his personality, just as she’s trapped in hers.
Some of the New York reviews of “The Lacemaker” have found a Marxist line in it: Francois, the bourgeois intellectual, uses and then discards the working-class girl. I don’t read it that way. I think Goretta and Pascal Laine, who wrote the screenplay, are looking with compassion on both characters. If Francois drives Pomme to sadness, silence and disorientation, he does so at great cost to himself because, in ways he doesn’t understand and may never understand, he’s lost a person who really was precious to him. Lost her through convincing himself he wanted a girl different than the one he fell in love with.
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