“Les paumées du petit matin is largely about watching and being watched. The film is specifically about watching two girls, but more than that, it is about viewing how two girls are expected to be seen, to be see-able. Girls are shown in a number of concrete ways (and to specific ends), but they are traditionally given very little control over how they are viewed. Les paumées du petit matin explores the roles and objects which a ‘girl’ is allowed to be seen as, and explores how she might express some measure of control over how she is seen. Unfortunately, Michelle and Marie often thwart their own attempts to assert control, most notably when their violent reactions too be seen as sexual objects at the end of the film leads directly to their own demise. Rollin’s film offers a visual reading of whether the roles that girls are forced into are escapable - or at least if they can be resisted, at times - and under what conditions this rebellion is possible. Rollin’s Michelle and Marie are two girls apart - not a part of the asylum and its strict adherence to generally conservative social performance, the less-savory bar-centric community, or the upper-class group. As Rollin himself says in an interview on the 2015 Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, Michelle and Marie are 'two girls who didn’t have their own world’. Several ethereal scenes (marked by cinematic and sound differences from the rest of the film) recreate traditional images or progressive shots of intimacy - homosocial and romantic intimacy, respectively - that more closely relate the girls to one another than ever to any other character. As they are not a part of this world, as the director puts it, then they are not a part of society; in turn, the girls meet every attempt of organized society to 'put them in their place,’ so to speak, with violence.” - Lisa Cunningham, from “Les paumées du petit matin: a view of female violence” in “Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin”, 2017.
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