Only the first reel of the film with the plot’s beginning still exists. Two young women with a shared past of poverty, humble home and street work meet anew. Now, they live in two different worlds: one is a middle-class wife and mother, and the other found fortune in the demi-monde. The drama is set into action by the harsh system of rules the bourgeois woman alone must follow: a milieu of restricted movement, because if you make the wrong step you fall, are expelled and lose everything. So happy to see these three hundred metres of meticulous photography and a breathtaking egret hat that we do not miss the rest so much. We know how it will end: good (forgiveness) and bad (death).

Mariann Lewinsky