La jeune fille d'une nuit review: Silly 1930s door-slamming fun

You should only watch La jeune fille d'une nuit if you absolutely love dusty 1930s French comedies where everyone spends half the runtime hiding behind heavy drapes. If you want fast pacing or modern humor, you will probably turn this off after ten minutes.

It is a silly little film, but it has a strange charm if you are in the right mood. 🛋️

The whole plot is basically a big misunderstanding. Betty is trying to stop her sister from ruining her life with a fancy Count, so she decides to seduce the guy herself to distract him.

Except she flirts with the Count's son by mistake. It is exactly the kind of setup you have seen a thousand times in old stage plays.

Honestly, the sister's husband is so incredibly boring that I kind of wished she did run off with the Count. He just sits there looking miserable and complaining about his tea.

But Käthe von Nagy is the real reason to watch this. She has these incredibly expressive eyes that do most of the heavy lifting in every single scene.

There is a moment early on where she tries to look "seductive" to the wrong guy, and it just looks like she got some dust stuck in her eye. I laughed out loud, though I am not entirely sure if it was supposed to be that funny.

The print I watched had this constant hissing sound in the background. It felt like someone was frying bacon in the next room the entire time.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of La jeune fille d'une nuit (1934) through its definitive frames.

It actually added to the cozy, ancient vibe of the whole thing. It made me feel like I was digging through a box of old photos in an attic.

This movie reminded me a bit of The Perfect Lady, mostly because of how these old films treat "scandalous" behavior with such cute, innocent horror.

Oh, and Lucien Baroux is great here. He has this amazing way of reacting to bad news where his face just completely deflates.

He looks like a balloon losing air very slowly. You can tell he was having a blast with the physical comedy.

The set design is incredibly fancy but feels very flat, almost like a stage play. You can tell they just built three rooms in a studio and made everyone run between them until the script ran out of pages.

There is one servant character who shows up for about two minutes, drops a tray, and is never seen again. I wonder if the actor just walked onto the wrong set that day and they kept it in.

If you liked Gretl Wins First Prize, you will probably find this one decent enough. It has that same light, bubbly European energy from the decade before everything changed.

Just do not expect anything mind-blowing. It is a movie that is perfectly happy being silly and then just ending.

Sometimes that is exactly what you need on a rainy Sunday afternoon. 🌧️