Film Forum

(1945) Micheline Presle, up from the provinces to marry famed fashion designer Raymond Rouleau’s best friend, proves a sitting duck for the alley-cat courtier; but what he eventually realizes… Atmospheric evocation of the mostly female hothouse milieu of a top fashion house, made during the Occupation but released just after. The first to be billed “Un Film de Jacques Becker.” DCP. Approx. 95 min.​

Reviews

“I cry each time I see [Falbalas], but it gave me my vocation in life. It directed the way that I should make fashion – somebody in action, making the clothes, doing the fittings, having a muse. It was a very good portrait of the profession.”
– Jean Paul Gaultier

“BECKER’S FIRST MASTERWORK. Filmed with an elegant, graceful, decisive rapidity. Falbalas is a story of love unto madness—of the tangle of artistic inspiration, commercial responsibility, intimate betrayal, and romantic agony that leads to destruction. Becker himself was a self-described ‘maniac' about details, and he calibrates the film’s action exquisitely. The work in the fashion house—the comings and goings of employees, friends, and lovers—is choreographed with a turbulence that never dispels its air of refinement. For the first time, he proved himself to be a master of the closeup, the burning stare into camera, the nearly unbearable intimacy with characters that the cinema grants directors—and viewers.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“The most original, and best, of [Becker’s] early films… Every detail of the dressmaking process seems to fascinate the director, and he manages to make viewers care no less than he does.”
– David Mermelstein, The Wall Street Journal