This is the second in a series of five essays about Olivia (1951). These essays are based on personal reflections, research, and observations related to the film. I offer these words only in appreciation of the film and those who made it.
Since its restoration and re-release in 2019, Olivia has attracted new eyes, new opinions. Film enthusiasts, eager to whip up a review upon first viewing, have all written of the film’s predatory, unspeakable—and today, incomprehensible—queer love between a boarding school’s headmistress and her sixteen-year-old student. True, the film does depict some disturbing scenes and perpetuates the archaic and harmful (but ever-present in cinema) predatory lesbian trope. But there’s a lot going on in this film. So much, in fact, that what appears to be a few throwaway lines at the start of the film actually frame the crux of headmistress Mademoiselle Julie’s moral dilemma.
“Do you remember me? I’m Julie,” Julie says upon seeing Olivia for the first time in a decade. “No, of course not. You were just a baby back then. When we visited England, you were hardly six or seven.” The “we” here refers to Julie herself and her co-headmistress Mademoiselle Cara, indicating not only a long acquaintance with Olivia (and a joint one at that), but also a long committed partnership between them.
It’s not the audience’s fault that this little revelation seems so unimportant in the grand scheme of this story. It’s said in the first six minutes of the film just as the audience is inundated with images of the school’s opulence. Olivia is overwhelmed by it all—the lush and vast foyer of Les Avons, the sights and sounds of wooing children gathered to catch a glimpse of their elegant headmistress, the caressing nature of Julie herself—and so is the audience. The school, like Julie’s personality, is cultivated to seduce: everything within reach appeals to the senses. Olivia, at sixteen, is hyper-aware of every last one of hers.
Olivia’s familiarity with Julie and Cara is touched on only a handful of times in the film. There are brief mentions of Olivia’s mother from both headmistresses, but never enough emphasis on their relationship with Olivia’s family to override what we see in the film, which ultimately reads as a Cara-Julie-Olivia love triangle. Audiences today may overlook it, but audiences in 1951 would have been wise to the long history among these three characters.
The film was adapted from a novel of the same name by Dorothy (Strachey) Bussy, in which she provides a semi-autobiographical look at her time at Marie Souvestre’s famous girls’ boarding school Les Ruches. Souvestre founded the school with her purported partner Caroline Dussaut and, much later, founded the Allenswood Boarding Academy where she counted Eleanor Roosevelt among her most promising and loyal pupils1.
Bussy’s mother, a friend of Souvestre’s, sent her daughters to be educated at Les Ruches which resulted in an infatuation that plays out not only in the pages of Olivia, but also in what is now recognized as Jacqueline Audry’s most famous film. Audiences at the time would have recognized the story unraveling before them on screen: though written in the early 1930s, Olivia was not published until 1948, just three years before the film was released. The novel quickly gained traction among the English and was so popular that the task of translating it from English to French was given to Nobel Prize winning writer Roger Martin du Gard in 1949. He then shared it with Albert Camus saying, “Pay a moment’s attention to this teen drama, my dear Camus. I’m sure you won’t regret it.” Writer André Gide, though initially dismissive of the novel when Bussy first presented it to him in 1934, also advised on the translation (Camus). Bussy herself, who opted to publish the tale anonymously, spoke to the novel’s wide reach and potential for adaptation when corresponding with Gide:
I would also like to see Ms. Audry, the producers of my film, and try to persuade them to change some parts of Olivia's screenplay that they sent me. And I would like to tell you about what you call my "drama". Last winter, Ida Bourdet, who is one of my enthusiastic admirers, begged me to give her the English text which she undertook to have translated and probably accepted by a major Parisian theater! She just sent me her translation, which she intends to send to Madeleine Renaud. Overall it's not bad at all, although it seems to me that the language of schoolgirls could be improved. If you have any influence on Madeleine Renaud, perhaps you could say a word to her in my favor. It is true that someone from Stock told me in the most affirmative way the other day that Olivia had been offered to Gallimard, who had refused it because of your negative opinion. It was in vain that I told him that it had never been offered to Gallimard. He sounded very superior and hinted that he knew from a private source that the story was true, and added, “Of course Gide couldn't be interested in a girl's story at all!” Is it possible that Gallimard is circulating this legend? (Gide 570)
The book, well-circulated and well-read in England and France at the time, makes clear that Julie and Cara have long been acquaintances of Olivia’s mother and have served, in essence, as godmothers to Olivia:
I was rather more than sixteen when my mother decided to take me away from Miss Stock’s and send me for my “finishing” to a school in France. There was one already chosen to hand, kept by two French ladies whom my mother had met several years earlier when she was staying in a hotel in Italy, and who had remained her friends ever since. Mademoiselle Julie T—— and Mademoiselle Cara M—— were dim figures flitting occasionally through my childhood, barely distinguishable from each other, but invested in a kind of romance from the fact of their foreign nationality. They sometimes came to stay with us a little in the holidays. They nearly always sent me a child’s French book on New Year’s day. Starting with Les Malheurs de Sophie, we progressed gradually through several volumes of Erckmann-Chatrian up to La Petite Fadette and François le Champi, with one lurid and delightful interruption to dullness in the shape of a novel by Alphonse Daudet arranged for young people. Thanks to my mother and a French nursery-maid, I knew French pretty well, that is I understood it when spoken and could read it fluently; but time was too precious to be wasted on French books, so that the only ones I read were my New Year presents, and those only as a matter of duty and politeness. (Strachey 11)
The context provided in this passage is exploited by the film to tell a deeper, more complex story than what unfolds in the novel. It’s also the kind of context one needs to view the film fairly. Although the 1948 novel was re-released in 2020 with a foreword by Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman, the details of the narrative rarely factor into present-day assertions about the nature of the story. And yet, if we’re to understand the film’s true intent, the quick explanation in the film’s opening of the history between Olivia and headmistresses mustn’t be overlooked.
It’s true that Olivia is infatuated—perhaps even in love—with Julie and that the film itself offers the story of a young girl’s queer awakening. That is the primary message audiences are to glean from this film. But it is also true that the film offers a glimpse at Olivia’s future in Julie, who not only has long been awakened to the flames of her own nature but has seen them all but extinguished by her ill-fated relationship with Cara.
There’s no denying that Julie harbors an inappropriate love for Olivia. She does say, after all, that she loves the girl (“Je t’aime bien, mon enfant. Plus que tu ne crois.”) and often motions to demonstrate that love, only to stop short of doing something criminal. I would argue that these demonstrations stem less from her own moral depravity than they do from having been rebuffed by the woman she really loves: Cara. The trio’s shared history allows for this rebound to happen seamlessly and without question from neither Julie herself nor from onlookers at the school. It isn’t until Julie’s interest in Olivia is reciprocated that the story takes a disastrous turn.
In the next post of this series, I’ll dig deeper into the relationship between Julie and Cara and how the positioning of Olivia between them serves as a rare cinematic window through which the audience is invited to witness the innerworkings of queer love.
Footnotes:
1. Eleanor Roosevelt is often credited with championing the 1931 version of Mädchen in Uniform as an important and necessary film, which resulted in its screening in the United States.
Citations:
1. Camus, Albert, and Roger Martin Du Gard. Correspondance (1944-1958). Gallimard, 2013.
2. Gide André, et al. Correspondance André Gide – Dorothy Bussy. Gallimard, 1979.
3. Strachey, Dorothy, and Aciman André. Olivia. Penguin Books, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
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