Isabelle Huppert won the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award for her portrayal of a shy 18-year-old experiencing her first love affair in The Lacemaker. Writing in the Soho News, Diane Jacobs notes, “The Lacemaker (is) a lovely film that is quite a bit more complicated than its limpid surfaces suggest. Set in France, it is the story of a young beauty parlor assistant and a Sorbonne undergraduate who meet while vacationing in Normandy, fall in love, live together for a while and separate. While his is an intellectual sensibility, she has a fresh and waiting-to-be-explored, nonverbal kind of love that is expressed through the way she folds linens, washes lettuce, kisses.... Goretta develops his plot like his heroine, through suggestion. We watch the story unfold as a series of privileged glimpses.... The sequences evolve like isolated diary pages, torn out weeks apart and strung painstakingly together.”