Therese and Isabelle
Therese has returned to her old boarding school, haunted by the past of a love, for one of her classmates Isabelle. As she walks the campus, revisiting key places from her past, memories start coming back up, and we see the events that led her to be so closed off.
Like the other film of Radley Metzger’s I’ve seen (“The Dirty Girls”), “Therese and Isabelle” shows him to be a filmmaker whose work is erotic but not pornographic. That’s an important distinction. Over the years I’ve always found films such as this to be infinitely more arousing than the few porn titles I’ve seen (which I’ll go into more next week). The reason is simple- it’s the story, stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for copious amounts of nudity, but that’s all porn is. None of those I’ve seen have had much of anything else.
“Therese and Isabelle” is short on nudity, but long on erotic feelings. That’s not to say it’s a great film (the story, based on a novel by Violette Leduc, is fairly simplistic in the telling, and the dialogue doesn’t exactly linger long in the memory- in any good way, exactly), but it’s effective in the way it intends to be, and anchored by two solid performances by Essy Persson (as Therese) and Anna Gael (as Isabelle) that are playful and sensual.
This is a beautifully shot film, especially during the first real glimpse of Therese and Isabelle’s lovemaking, which we don’t see up close but we do see enough of their bodies, and their faces, to feel the pleasure they’re experiencing (Therese’s narration helps with the hypnotic effect, but the visuals are enough). Despite its’ handsome production values and artistic ambitions, however, there are moments when it goes into exploitation film foolishness, but in a way, that’s not really a bad thing. It keeps the film from getting overly serious and pretentious.
For my money, Metzger doesn’t spend enough time exploring the effects of Therese’s mother’s remarrying on Therese and how it effects her relationship with Isabelle, but that’s not the point I suppose. The point is to make an erotic exploration of love between two women, and the isolation that brings forth for one of them when the other one leaves her life forever. The best part is how Metzger makes an almost classical romance out of this story that at the time, was anything but. It’s not always as thoughtful and enlightening as it wants to be, but it’s always entertaining and engaging.
