Simone Barbès or virtue

de Marie-Claude Treilhou
France • 1980 • 1h14
with Ingrid Bourgoin, Martine Simonet, Michel Delahaye, Sonia Saviange, Noël Simsolo, Pascal Bonitzer, Paulette Bouvet

Simone Barbès is open in a porn movie. One night, after her work, she goes to a lesbian nightclub. Then she meets a man alone and desperate.

“As a master of a cult and an infinite grace, the film appears as one of the forgotten masterpieces of French cinema, a possible connection between popular pre-war cinema and libertarian conquests according to the New Wave. He would even embodi, retrospectively, what progressism calls today of his vows: a countermodel concerned with marginalities, sexual diversity, written and shot in a mad impulse by a young woman fighting for barely 30 years. Thirty-eight years later, he lost nothing of his existential broiling or his sentimental verve. » The World