Delphine Seyrig plays Madame Tabard, married to the owner of a shoe shop and the object of a naive young man’s fantasies. The actress leaves an indelible trace of her personality, despite this being a secondary role in the so-called Doinel series, featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud in five Truffaut films. “Madame Tabard isn’t a woman, she’s an apparition”, asserted Léaud emphatically. Laying down the terms and conditions for a casua sexual fling, Seyrig corrects this reductive description echoing the famous quote from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman.” “I am not an apparition, I am a woman, which is quite the opposite. For instance, this morning, before coming here, I put on my makeup. I powdered my nose. I made up my eyes. And walking through Paris, I noticed that all the other women had done the same.” Another feminist actress, Marie-France Pisier, had also come up with a witty put-down to Léaud in Antoine and Colette (1962).
In Baisers volés, Seyrig’s physical self-assurance, her irony-tinged tone and her power to captivate allow her to transcend the limits of a minor role as a bourgeoise in a lightweight comedy and to amplify her scenes. It leaves you wondering exactly who took the initiative – the writers or the actress – of coming up with such a modern monologue in 1967, consigning the notion of the eternal feminine to the dust.

Florence Tissot