Léontine

Titine and her family go for a fast-motion bicycle ride while enveloping the whole public sphere in their raging tornado of bodily ventilation. They knock over pedestrians, café diners, and horse-drawn carriages. Finally, they are steamrolled by the superior fan of a gas-guzzling automobile. Translated from Le Bulletin Pathé, they “are swept in turn like simple fetuses”

In a last gasp effort to school Titine in domestic labor, her parents entrust her with housesitting. She executes her obligations with catastrophic aplomb, shattering all the dishes in the gesture of cleaning them. She manages to flood and incinerate her entire home simultaneously. In a futile effort to find her baby brother and pet dog, she inherits a horde of stray canines and orphaned babies.

Yet again, Léontine ignores the well-meaning advice of her mother. She attempts to hang her downstairs neighbor (played by a man in drag) with a rope, which she then uses to attach a bookseller’s kiosk to a moving vehicle. A vengeful mob and the police gather, as they do, but she entraps them on a scaffolding by removing the rope ladder.

Léontine helps her pal Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) race against time to clean up a house after Rosalie’s boss, Baron von Hummen, announces that he and Madame will return home earlier than planned. They recruit workers and poach resources from a nearby construction site. As we see, it takes a village to tidy a house on short notice (or at least it should!), but there’s a limit to the capacities of even collective domestic labor. Accelerated productivity gives way to sheer physical anarchy and irreversible destruction. Dirt and debris pervade every surface—furniture and skin alike—leading to several unfortunate blackening gags.

Rosalie and Léontine go to the theater and are swept away by big emotions.

Hell hath no fury like Léontine with a piece of string! Our favorite mutinous miscreant returns with her weapon of choice, “pulling the strings” as she baits greedy bystanders to snatch at the tempting objects that ever elude their grasps. Léontine is an evil puppet-master who preys on consumer capitalism’s vicious loop between wanting and having. Her angry victims form a vengeful mob and chase after her, but she trips them with string and then rides off into the woods. Real violence is averted by a clever substitution trick and Léontine celebrates with her iconic victory dance.

The oldest surviving film in the Léontine series, this incomplete escapade features everyone’s favorite “mistress of mayhem” doing what she does best: wreaking total havoc and defying repressive authority. Léontine runs errands for a milliner, whereupon she steals the ludicrously oversized chapeau she was tasked with delivering to a valued customer. She adds insult to injury by leading her property-owning victims down a royal road of utter humiliation.

Léontine lights up our lives with an electric battery, electrocuting everyone in her path. Her victims include two old ladies (played by men in drag), dancers at a café, workers on a construction site, a group of lackluster conscripts, and the local police force. To add insult to injury, she douses everyone with buckets of water.