Olivia

Olivia is one of the best lesbian films of all time.

It brings to rich emotional life the swirl of influence and passion inside an all-girls boarding school buzzing with sentimental education around its grand central staircase.

Feuillere holds the screen in all kinds of ways, conveying the psychology of a woman who understands the effect she has on impressionable girls and wants to wield it for their betterment.

Olivia is a particularly beautiful watch. Within lavish costumes, bedrooms, and ballrooms, the story is surprisingly intimate.

It's a study in female relationships, their complexity, and the centralizing of female desire, couched in the form of a complex gothic melodrama that prizes women above all else.

Audry's approach [in this film] was primarily mannered-nearly suffocatingly so-occasionally bordering on the naturalistic.

Olivia's lovestruck, aching experience and self-realization are made vivid by Jacqueline Audry. Exceptional in more ways than one, Olivia proves to be ripe for rediscovery.

...just like the school itself, Olivia thrums with the rhythm of life, pain and joy just beneath its pretty trappings.

Audry's film manages to explore complexities and subtleties in how women act in their relationships and in their professional spaces, precisely by allowing them an unresolvable ambiguity.

Director Audry and her sister, screenwriter Colette Audry, made Olivia as artists, not activists. And the cast of exquisitely nuanced actresses exercised imaginative understatement.