Claude Goretta followed his successful film, The Lacemaker (see July 6) with another study of a woman struggling out of a protective (provincial) cocoon in hopes of blossoming in the real world (Paris). Nathalie Baye portrays an architectural designer who leaves her native Lorraine for Paris in order to reverse the dreary path her sheltered life has taken. But her first job possibility anticipates future let-downs as she quickly becomes the object of a sexual pass; an affair with a married man (Bruno Ganz) ends when she refuses to relocate with him--to Japan; and a new friendship with a wry actress offers yet another bitter job prospect, prostitution. In the end, the simplicity of her uneventful Lorraine draws her back, disappointed, still unemployed, but with her scruples intact. Goretta creates a Paris that is stripped of its allure for this critique of the incivilities of urban civilization; his countryside, by contrast, glows with gentle warmth, but is, ultimately, only a more pastoral setting for his heroine's inevitable isolation.