The Love of a Woman (L' Amour d' une Femme)

In collaboration with the Plein-Air Festival by the French Institute of Greece.

The movie will be screened with greek SDH subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

Entrance with free-admission tickets, distributed one hour before the screening.

Director: Jean Grémillon
Starring: Micheline Presle, Massimo Girotti, Gaby Morlay
Runtime: 103’
Year of Production: 1953
Language: French
Subtitles: Greek

A young doctor arrives on the island of Ouessant in Brittany, at the northwest of France, in order to replace the retiring doctor there. In the isolated community of the area she will quickly win over the few, initially tight-knit, residents. And she will fall madly in love with an engineer who is there for temporary work. But when they start planning their future, she will stumble upon his beliefs that want her to give up her profession in order to become a housewife.

Female empowerment in a 1953 film is not the most reasonable thing to expect, but the great Jean Grémillon (whose “Summer Light” some of you might have enjoyed at our screening last year), combines his distinctive cinema with that exact notion. His cinematography is solid, symbolically loaded but never heavy, full of subtle gestures or camera movements (note the lens approach and pull away from the heroine at key points) that deepen the drama. Micheline Presle (who is still with us and will turn 101 next August!) is exemplary in the central role, with a vigor and sensitivity that will give birth to the stunning final shot. A lighthouse foretells from the start the melancholy of this rare, hard-to-find film, the same lighthouse hosts an unforgettable scene, while the island generously provides as much atmosphere as the drama needs to underpin its world. Ilias Dimopoulos