Félicité

A talented actress ,Christine Pascal tried her hand at directing in the late seventies with the much-debated "Félicité " ;she got close for honors with her excellent "le petit prince a dit"(1992)which was awarded the Louis Delluc prize and featured an unexpected (and daring) ending. In Claude Miller's masterpiece ," la meilleure façon de marcher" ,her character was more mature than those of the male leads, and her vision of sexuality was very convincing.

"Félicité " is not a very accessible movie;the fact that I fell asleep halfway through did not bode well;but as I liked Christine Pascal,a Bertrand Tavernier's protégée ,I decided to give the movie a second chance .

Let's accentuate the positive :it should be considered an experimental movie :the portrait of a woman, her sexuality, her c.omplexes; the director uses the screen as the shrink's coach : so there are many flashbacks which bring back childhood memories when her mom used to tell her she was too fat ,which brought about anorexis ; later,as a grown up ,we attend a long dialog with a GP when she talks about pleasure and masturbation, still a taboo subject at the time .

The whole film is shrouded in a bluish dreary light ,in which the actress strips bare (in both sense of the expression)

Whether it's an autobiographical movie is a question that has been shelved .But in the Proust questionnaire ,in 1984,she indicated that she wanted to die ; in 1996, she committed suicide by throwing herself out a window of a psychiatric hospital.