What Maisie Knew

It takes a certain audacity to adapt one's first film from a novel that has been described as 'one of the most remarkable technical achievements in fiction'. But Henry James' vision of venery seen through innocent eyes proves the perfect vehicle for Mangolte's own fascination with the peculiar ambivalence of the filmic, its ability to render perceptions that can be at the same time subjective and impersonal. Here her evocative sensual imagery traces out fragments of memories, glimpses of gestures from a remote, mysterious adult world of erotic desires, all observed with a detached curiosity which approaches the Jamesian ideal of allowing each scene 'to emerge and prevail - vivid, special and wrought hard to the hardness of the unforgettable'.