Olivia is a recently rediscovered (not really but sort of) lesbian melodrama from 1950s France and released in the U.S. in 1954.
It's... well the whole thing is sort of hysterical, and I found it difficult to get interested in it. I think, maybe, too, it was the fact the film never gets there. We dance and dance around desire, but nothing ever arrives. I find the kind of teasing that Miss Julie, Olivia's object of affection, wields to be tiresome.
The texts of Racine stud the film throughout, so Jacqueline Audry is clearly playing with unrealized desire as such on the thematic level (think of the unresolved, unrequited, and unconsummated loves of Bérénice and Phèdre), but I think this film was just not for me, Racine or no.
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