The Fifteen Year Old Widows
Early Short Films of the French New Wave
•
24m
Directed by Jean Rouch • Drama • 2023 • 25 minutes
“When I’m old, at 25, I’ll get married and that will be the end.” —Véronique
In this short, Jean Rouch turns his anthropological eye to bourgeois teenage girls in Paris, in the summer of 1964. Caught in the in-between world of adolescence (they buy both Le Monde and children’s comics at a newsstand), Véronique and Marie-France seem to be trying on adult personalities to see how they fit. Véronique is the nihilist party girl, and Marie-France the intellectual who thinks it’s OK to have some hope for the future. Billed as an essay, THE FIFTEEN YEAR OLD WIDOWS may have been intended as a condemnation of a vacuous bourgeois existence—complete with horse farms and private swimming pools—but today it is more illuminating as a time capsule of the era’s attitudes towards young women. They read Baudelaire, who calls them “fools” and “sluts.” They crave the attention of insulting and condescending boys, while still recognizing them as “assholes.” And they are already becoming very much aware of the attentions of adult men.
The film is also notable for an appearance by French filmmaker Maurice Pialat, as a fashion photographer shooting Véronique, and trying to break through her cynical worldview.
Up Next in Early Short Films of the French New Wave
-
Love Exists
Directed by Maurice Pialat • Documentary • 1961 • 19 minutes
Maurice Pialat may have grown up in the suburbs, but he has little love for them. In this poetic but critical essay, he turns his gaze to a range of post-war Paris suburbs: From the bourgeois plots of land where the “little” aesthetic ...
-
The Overworked
Directed by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze • Drama • 1957 • 25 minutes
A morality tale about the dangers of modern urban life. Catherine (Yane Barry), a champion young typist from small-town France, heads to Paris to be with her fiancé (Jean-Pierre Cassel) — who also happens to be her new boss. Living ...
-
The Marines
Directed by François Reichenbach • Documentary • 1957 • 21 minutes
François Reichenbach follows a group of young men from the day they enlist in the US Marine Corps, all the way through basic training. The power of this is twofold. It lies in the poetic visuals focused on the men’s faces and exp...
