La Dérive

In 1967, Cahiers du cinéma called Paula Delsol the “greatest female auteur of our cinema” even though she had written and directed but a single feature: LA DÉRIVE, a fresh and dark story of an errant girl who drifts from man to man. Jacquie (Jacqueline Vandal) is a gorgeous dropout who has abandoned her hometown of Palavas-les- Flots, a fishing village south of Montpellier. But after her boyfriend unceremoniously drops her, she reluctantly returns and begins to meet men in a noxious swirl of adventure, threat and money. LA DÉRIVE has all the elliptical brio one would expect from the Nouvelle Vague—its editor, Agnès Guillemot, worked extensively with Jean-Luc Godard—but is coloured by desperation and attuned to the brutal, interlocking regimes of gender and class. Without shame or judgment, it shows how dead ends and acts of self-sabotage are woven into the texture of a woman’s experience, and how a stubborn attachment to the dream of a different life persists despite them all. Prohibited to audiences under eighteen at the time of release, it fell into oblivion; now, in a new restoration from the Cinémathèque Française, a film that should have never been forgotten is ripe for rediscovery. (Erika Balsom)

Paula Delsol: BEN ET BÉNÉDICT (1977)