The easiest way to describe this French drama would be to start with the sensational event that I already knew about when I saw this, thanks to the preview. However, it doesn’t happen until about an hour in, so I won’t. Further, describing the movie this way, or saying that it’s based on an actual event, might suggest that the film itself is sensationalistic, and it isn’t at all.
Yet it’s this event that ties the plot together. To just say that it’s the story of an average young woman (Émelie Dequenne), living with her mother (Catherine Deneuve) in suburban Paris, looking for work, and meeting a cocky young man is less compelling. If I hadn’t seen the preview, I’d have thought, Where is this going? I did think, Is the boyfriend going to turn out to be a creep? Why are there some seemingly unrelated scenes about a kid who’s about to be bar mitzvahed and his estranged parents? And what’s Deneuve doing playing the role of a suburban mother? I couldn’t decide if the tension I felt was because I knew what was going to happen, or whether it was director André Techiné’s camera work. But my interest would have been maintained in any case because of the way I wasn’t sure what path the drama would take, regardless.
It’s probably the kind of movie that certain people I know would see and say, yes, but what was it trying to say? Which is to say, the movie is not really about the mysterious event, but simply about a suburban girl who’s a little confused about what she wants to do with her life. It’s an exterior movie, not one that penetrates the character’s inner thoughts. What she does is not well explained, and I thought the point was that people do things for reasons they can’t explain and haven’t thought through. But I enjoyed the story because I didn’t think Techiné was trying to say something, just telling the story. And Deneuve does get to do more in the second half of the film.
IMDB link
viewed 4/29/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/30/10
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