La vieille fille et le mort

is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Clarisse, who keeps the village café/grocery is in her fifties and still single, but not from want of offers. One evening a stranger comes into her café who has none of those male faults that have ruled out all previous applicants for her. This finally seems to be a man who might do as a companion, and Clarisse is very tempted to keep him all to herself. There's only one problem: he is inexplicably, but quite indisputably, dead. And doesn't appear to have anything to say to her.

We're definitely in 1950s theatre-of-the-absurd territory here: it's very easy to imagine this as a stage play, with poor Clarisse trying to secure some quality time one-to-one with the corpse, but constantly show more being interrupted by villagers who want to buy a glass of beer, some salt or a length of ribbon as an excuse to cry on her shoulders about their own problems (because Clarisse is obviously a key figure in the society of the village, even while she thinks of herself as an outsider.)

Of course there's a satirical point that you could reduce to that famous poster about fish and bicycles, but Leduc never makes it that explicit. She keeps the focus tightly on the world as Clarisse sees it. Even when we zoom out from the café in between scenes to pick up some nature imagery, it is all clearly coming from inside Clarisse's head.

Definitely odd, but rewarding. show less