Juliette's Fate
Aline Issermann's acclaimed first feature, based on real events, relates the contemporary story of a country girl who grows into womanhood while trapped in a loveless marriage arranged by her family for economic purposes. Juliette (Laure Duthilleul), the daughter of a drunken father and a depressed mother, seems destined to repeat the fate of her parents when they marry her off to another wretched drunk, a railway employee Marcel (Richard Bohringer), in order to secure housing for their family. But even as Marcel's state deteriorates along with the marriage over some twenty years, Juliette finds the strength to transcend the misery that “fate” seems to have dealt her. The film was a highlight of the San Francisco International Film Festival '84, where David Thomson wrote, “(Laure Duthilleul) moves from being a tough Pagnol character to possessing the stoic acceptance of someone in a Bresson film.... It is as if she has always been a part of the film's style: exposed and sad, but not self-pitying; alert to the grim effect of surroundings and the reluctant passage of hard times.”