Eric Rohmer

The Marquise of O Eric Rohmer

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, this period drama by French director Eric Rohmer is set in Italy in 1799 during the Franco-Prussian war, and spoken in the German language of the Kleist novella on which it is based. The Marquis of O is a beautiful young widow who is captured and assaulted by Russian soldiers. Unconscious during the attack, it is only later that she discovers she is pregnant, and her initial shame and embarrassment about what has happened gradually escalates into panic and desperation.

The film focuses on the young Marquis's struggle to reconcile the bourgeois obsession with respectability prevalent in society (not to mention her family) at the time, and the exciting sensations that are overtaking her.