A director steals her life, then steals her role. French New Wave savagery at 90 minutes.
A young, unscrupulous director hires an actress and uses the story she tells him of her life to write his screenplay, but fires her and entrusts the leading role to someone else.
Direction
Leroi plays himself, blurring documentary and cruelty in real time.
Acting
Berto's simmering awareness shes being consumed as material.
Director
Francis Leroi
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Released at the tail end of the French New Wave, this film embodies the movements collapse into self-cannibalism—filmmakers turning their cameras on the act of filmmaking itself until nothing but cruelty remained.
Juliet Berto would become a major star in Rivettes films; this early role finds her already wise to how directors chew up women and call it cinema.
FR
