A Girl from Lorraine

Single, stifled and 31, Baye's 'provinciale' uproots for a Paris peopled largely with fellow exiles (Swiss pill salesman Ganz, struggling German actress Winkler) in search of work and...well, she's not quite sure what else. What she doesn't want, but all she finds, is a succession of relationships set in parentheses, circumscribed as much by economics as emotions. Ganz's promotion ends their affair; friend Winkler sells herself to keep kids and career together. Baye is an only slightly tougher cousin of Goretta's tragic 'lace-maker', but every bit as 'innocent', and her director really has nothing new to say in this insubstantially vague portrait of sensitivity and metropolitan moral recession. A romanticist's tut-tutting just doesn't cut deep enough: it's no more than a wistful sigh of a movie.