Jacqueline Audry’s Colette films: post-war quality style with a feminist edge

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jacqueline Audry was that rare phenomenon, a woman film director in mid-twentieth century France. Drawn to Colette’s work by her appreciation of the latter’s style and close affinity with her values, Audry fought the initial reluctance of producers and went on to make three films based on Colette’s fictions, all with the author’s approval and the first, Gigi (1949), with her active collaboration. Very much in the ‘quality’ style, these entertaining costume dramas set in the prosperous, liberal era of the Belle Époque gave cinematic form to Colette’s stylistic verve and implicitly feminist philosophy. Audry’s Colette films tell stories of young women on a quest for self-realisation against the constraints of a patriarchal society and are laced with an (often humorous) irony in their representation of gender roles. Audry’s case, this article aims to show, demonstrates that the quality style so reviled by the New Wave could in fact be a form of cinema that effectively combined popular appeal with the seriousness of a subtly progressive feminist politics.