Six years after Marco Bellocchio’s La balia (The Nanny, 1999) comes another period study of class centering on a hired wet-nurse: writer-director Antoine Santana’s La ravisseuse, which for some peculiar reason has been given the title A Song of Innocence in the States. In their different ways, the impoverished illiterate, Angèle-Marie, and her mistress, Charlotte, both 18, are under the patriarchal thumb of Charlotte’s upwardly mobile, career-minded spouse, Julien, a painfully straight yippie transported back in time to 1877. The girls bond, and in a just universe both would flee with the baby; but, as it happens, only one of them does this. Taking a cue from propriety, Charlotte, who had even dined with Angèle-Marie in Julien’s absence, thus dangerously blurring class boundaries, snaps at the servant-girl, “Lower your eyes when I speak to you!” and therefore seals her own fate. Not even her offer of daily milk to Julien, who has secretly coveted her breasts, can save Angèle-Marie her job; and news of her own baby’s death from cholera—an occupational hazard, from one disease or another—helps spur her final desperate act.
Santana is a moderately interesting artist but not an especially compelling one. Of the three main characters, Charlotte perhaps proves the most complex; marriage to Julien has raised her a bit, as her father, bled dry by the convent education he provided her, could not also provide Julien with a dowry, and we see her slipping back and forth between her wet-nurse’s and her husband’s rooms and influences. However, the most arresting performance comes from Anémone as Léonce, the older cook whose day-long drinking spoils Julien’s la-dee-da dinner, and who dislikes Angèle-Marie for suggesting incendiary potential that she (Léonce), with a similar history, has long since suppressed in herself.
Dennis Grunes 