TURN BACK TIME : Queerguru revisits OLIVIA (also known as The Pit of Loneliness) a 1951 French film directed by Jacqueline Audry, and based on the 1950 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Dorothy Bussy. It has been called a “landmark of lesbian representation.

Late nineteenth century in a finishing school for young girls near in France, the principal, the fascinating Miss Julie, sows confusion in the heart of the newcomer, Olivia.  The majority of the pupils in the school are divided into two camps: those who are devoted to the headmistress, Mlle Julie, and those who follow Mlle Cara, an emotionally manipulative invalid who is obsessed with Mlle Julie.

Olivia becomes an immediate favourite of Mademoiselle Cara, who shows her a photograph album full of pictures of the history of the school. When Olivia admires a girl in the pictures, Laura, Mlle Cara becomes angry and withdrawn; another pupil later explains that before she left, Laura was Mlle Julie’s favourite pupil. Later, Olivia hears Mlle Julie reading Andromaque and begins to fall in love with her.

“Olivia,” was based on the racy semi-autobiographical novel by Dorothy Bussy,  and is one such 19th-century callback, tracing the tentative love triangles and sublimated sexual urges of an all-girls boarding school in the French countryside. Shot as a melodrama in a sophisticated visual style by Audry very early in her twenty-year directing career, the dialogue is frank, but it is the silent emotions that Audry captures which reveal the instability of the residents of this candy-coated world.