Critics reviews

Olivia could be called “intersectional,” but that trendy term coarsens the film’s subtlety. Director Audry and her sister, screenwriter Colette Audry (the legendary French writer adapting Dorothy Bussey’s novel), made Olivia as artists, not activists. And the cast of exquisitely nuanced actresses exercised imaginative understatement.

While Audry’s adaptation certainly toned down the novel’s more overt sexuality, "Olivia" remains wildly ahead of its time by coding the school as a utopic space of female erotic expression and performance.

Audry's direction is as elegant as the surroundings; she loves fluid camera movement and graceful overhead shots.

Audry’s fluid camera work, particularly evident in her use of the school’s grand staircase to mark a shifting hierarchy of students and teachers, suggests the influence of Max Ophüls, for whom she worked as an assistant.

“Now I must bid farewell to all that I love.” It’s a line that comes late in Olivia, and though it’s one of the many grandiloquent, intensely delivered emotions that buffet this strange and beautiful film along its winding way, this moment hits particularly strongly.

The film version, Olivia (Jacqueline Audry, 1951), was made from an adapted screenplay by the director’s sister, Colette Audry, and this trifecta of female authors is meaningful as their feeling resonates through the text.