romantic love trio in Alsace at the end of the Great War

After Ping-pong, Matthias Luthardt extends his exploration of feelings in Louise which comes out Wednesday July 5th. From the contemporary era of his first film, he goes to 1918, in Alsace, German territory since 1870, where a young lonely farmer hides a fugitive and a German deserter.

Sexual choice

In October 1918, 25-year-old Luise (played by Luise Aschenbrenner) loses her mother with whom she took care of the family farm. One fine day, she discovers that a woman has been hiding in her home while she was away, Hélène (Christa Théret), a young Frenchwoman on the run to the Netherlands. Then it is a German soldier, Hermann (Leonard Kunz), who shows up, wounded by the fugitive and looking for her. Luise takes them both in, forming an explosive trio with them, between Hélène who risks being arrested and Hermann, now a deserter.

With LouiseMatthias Luthardt adapts The Fox (Fox, 1922), a short novel by author DH Lawrence. As in Lady Chatterley’s Loversex holds a good place in The Fox, discussed here from a gender perspective. The filmmaker takes liberties with the text, which could not publish a lesbian pamphlet in 1922. This is the side that Matthias Luthardt can now take. It sets the story at the end of the First World War in Alsace – while the original is set in Berkshire, and tackles sexual choice more frontally than in the original.

DH Lawrence released

The realization evokes with atmosphere the farm of 1918, in a realistic sobriety which flatters the eye without being aestheticizing. Luise is played by Luise Aschenbrenner, a little older than the role, but who seems younger, which feeds the film with a youthfulness in keeping with the choice of sexual orientation at the heart of the subject. The humor peaks when Luise tests Hermann’s performance in bed: a fiasco for her, but which satisfies the deserter. A counter-performance which will precipitate the choice of the young woman.

In the current wave of films about homosexuality and gender, Louise changes more or less self-fictional confessions that flourish. Matthias Luthardt plays the card of a novel where one feels the literary origins, by the temporal distance, but also the writing which privileges the image and the action, rather than the dialogues, to express the feelings. A beautiful adaptation that frees the words of DH Lawrence.

The sheet

Gender : Drama
Director: Matthias Luthardt
Actors: Christa Théret, Luise Aschenbrenner, Leonard Kunz
Country : Germany / France
Duration : 1h39
Exit : July 5, 2023
Distributer : Distribution Pyramid