Julietta

Directed by Marc Allégret

97 minutes / B&W
French / English subtitles
Release: 2022
Copyright: 1953

film poster

JULIETTA is a romantic comedy with the whimsical energy of a hummingbird. Dany Robin stars as the eponymous demoiselle, a flighty, impulsive pixie in white gloves who is engaged to an older prince, but already fantasizes about being his widow. On a train trip back to Paris she misses her train while returning a cigarette case to Andre (Jean Marais), a lawyer with a sprawling manor house in the country. Debacles pile up until Julietta decides she’d rather stay in the decaying mansion than get married at all, even if it means hiding in the attic from Andre’s own fiancée, the high-strung and spoiled Rosie (Jeanne Moreau, in her fourth year of making movies at age 25).

Not unlike a Rock Hudson-Doris Day farce of the day, replete with mistaken identities, scrambling set-pieces, accidental kidnappings, etc., Marc Allegret’s film pops its balls in the air and keeps them there. Robin and Moreau are both glowing and hilarious, even if it’s Marais that holds the film together, dashing up and down staircases in a harried sweat, trying to keep the inadvertently sequestered and ridiculously irresponsible teen in his house from being found out. The story delivers its own payload of French eccentricity, finding sunlit pleasure in nonconformism and in the blithe rejection of social rules. Photographed with a breathtaking silver streak by master DP Henri Alekan (LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE), JULIETTA is a champagne-bubbly postwar delight too long unseen by U.S. audiences.

“One of Marc Allégret’s slickest and most inspired comedies is this hectic ménage à trois farce, a film which effectively combines the elements of social satire, rom-com and vaudeville into one heady gag-packed concoction.” — FrenchFilms.org

Other Ways to Watch

Individuals

Home use DVD for $29.98

Available online from:

Credits

A film by Marc Allégret
Starring Jean Marais, Dany Robin, Jeanne Moreau, Denise Grey

Select Accolades

  • Official Selection, Berlin International Film Festival 1954

RELATED TITLES

Veteran director Marc Allegret’s philosophical and restrained adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s sexually explosive novel, the first time it was ever brought to film.

Marc Allégret | 2022 | 104 minutes | English subtitles

At a Viennese conservatory, a seductive singing teacher seduces his students, with both dramatic and near-tragic results. Stars Brigitte Bardot.

Marc Allégret | 2022 | 96 minutes | English subtitles

In 1925, novice French filmmaker Marc Allégret headed to equatorial Africa, on a journey to film the people of the Congo region.

Marc Allégret | 117 minutes | French | English subtitles

A highly personal portrait of André Gide — a larger-than-life character who dominated French letters from the turn of the 20th century to his death in 1951.

Marc Allégret | 2019 | 92 minutes | French | English subtitles