New Restoration

“Reveals already a masterful filmmaking sensibility at work … Its long shots, striking sense of space, and hypnotic musical score anticipates the work of the Taiwanese New Wave, with a distinct feminist and postcolonial gaze.”

Michelle Carey, Metrograph Journal

Before Mary Stephen became a member of Eric Rohmer’s family of collaborators as an editor in the 1980s, she was a director and student new to Paris from Canada. Inspired by Maya Deren and Marguerite Duras, she made this singular film of tactile, erotic suggestion and bold, asynchronous craft that has been impossible to see until its recent unearthing and restoration. Lysanne (Alexandria Brouwer) and Marlène (Stephen) have a linked history that begins in the ​’30s as schoolgirls and develops as they become figures of public society. As in Duras’s India Song, the soundtrack is a collage of onlookers’ voices, private notes, and the repeating cadence of a torch song. The images build competing narratives of intimacy and alienation; one sees in Stephen’s montage of photographic stills—the only evidence left behind from a pivotal party—the open ambiguity and musical playfulness she would train on love, friendship, and conflicting desires over the long career that would follow.

In French and Mandarin with English and French subtitles

“A tour de force of form, style, and historical imagination … Stephen extends and expands the connection of drama and form in ways that offer exemplary lessons to filmmakers today.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker
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