\n\tThe resemblance between Judith Godr\u00e8che and her daughter Tess Barth\u00e9lemy \u2014 also the luminous lead of her mother\u2019s debut feature \u201cA Girl\u2019s Life\u201d \u2014 will be particularly powerful for anyone familiar with Godr\u00e8che\u2019s teenage breakthrough role in the 1990 Jacques Doillon drama \u201cThe Disenchanted.\u201d Watching the doe-eyed Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my in this assured adaptation of Annie Ernaux\u2019s novel of the same title, one can\u2019t help but draw parallels between this bitter story of sexual initiation and the experiences of Godr\u00e8che\u2019s own life, namely the accusations of sexual abuse she lodged against Doillon (and the director B\u00eanoit Jacquot) as well as her standing, today, as one of the most notable champions of France\u2019s #MeToo movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut in step with Ernaux\u2019s vision, where extremely intimate, first-person narratives take on a collective, intentionally universalizing, sweep, \u201cA Girl\u2019s Life\u201d succeeds not just as a haunting echo of Godr\u00e8che\u2019s early years but as a moving, at times disturbing, meditation on the gender relations that normalize violence against women \u2014 specifically the kind of violence that\u2019s hard to recognize until well after the damage is done.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBookended by voiceover narration drawn straight from Ernaux\u2019s novel, delivered by a septuagenarian version of the writer performed by Val\u00e9rie Dr\u00e9ville, the film primarily tells the story of Annie at 17 (Barth\u00e9lemy) in the summer of 1958. With her fishbowl glasses and major sweet tooth, girlish Annie is a sheltered dreamer yearning to escape the Catholic restrictions of her smalltown existence and \u201cfind her people,\u201d which she expects will happen in the sunny months away from home during her first stint as a camp counselor in training.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThere, her enthusiasm is immediately met with hostility from the other counselors: mean girls in plaid skirts and lipstick and even crueler boys who think with their, uh, genitals. Their leader is a stocky, Brando-esque blond named \u2018H\u2019 (Victor Bonnel), who \u2014 as predicted, given his repeated preference for the \u2018new girl\u2019 each summer \u2014 sets his sights on our heroine. Annie is thrilled, but she doesn\u2019t expect to strip off her clothes quite so quickly, in an uncomfortably blunt and almost wordless sequence that leads the couple from a cavern party to the twin bed in Annie\u2019s shared dormitory. There is nothing romantic about her first time past first base, but Annie is blind to her own mistreatment, or at least convinced it\u2019s part of the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cA Girl\u2019s Life\u201d joins a cluster of recent Ernaux-inspired works, among them Danielle Arbid\u2019s \u201cSimple Passion\u201d (2020), an acclaimed stage rendering of \u201cThe Years\u201d that premiered in 2022, and the home-video documentary \u201cThe Super 8 Years\u201d (2022), written by Ernaux and directed by her son David Ernaux-Briot. But the Nobel Prize winner\u2019s most auspicious adaptation to date is doubtless Audrey Diwan\u2019s 2021 Venice Golden Lion winner \u201cHappening\u201d (2021): That film, a v\u00e9rit\u00e9-style account of a university student\u2019s illegal abortion in 1960s France, takes place a few years after the events of \u201cA Girl\u2019s Story\u201d in the timeline of Ernaux\u2019s life mapped out by her books.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBarth\u00e9lemy\u2019s Annie may be younger than Anamaria Vartolomei\u2019s protagonist Anne in \u201cHappening,\u201d but the stretch of time covered by Godr\u00e8che\u2019s film offers the young actress a similarly robust opportunity to showcase her dramatic chops. Impressively, she goes from a dorky (but still quick-witted) innocent, \u00e0 la Taylor Dearden in \u201cThe Pitt,\u201d to damaged and delusional, with something of a young Winona Ryder\u2019s manic glint in her eyes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe cinematographer Joachim Philippe keeps his camera close to Annie\u2019s face and captures, as if from her point of view, the drunken partying and canoodling that seems to happen every evening. Slow-motion and twilight neons initially give these scenes a romantic edge that turns deceptive and nefarious. One recurring image underscores the traumatic ugliness of Annie\u2019s arguably consensual rendezvous with H: a buzzing, dangling lightbulb shot from her perspective, looking up from underneath his body. Meanwhile, Godr\u00e8che\u2019s script offers a provocatively nuanced depiction of Annie\u2019s mental decline: She is as much a victim of groupthink as she is brainwashed into self-harm by the fantasies sold to young women about belonging and romance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tGodr\u00e8che digs deep into these masochistic behaviors so common among heterosexual relationships of Ernaux\u2019s generation; her layered, empathetic approach to these knotty feelings is the film\u2019s greatest virtue. Other elements are half-baked: a nurse played by Guslagie Malanda (\u201cSaint Omer,\u201d \u201cThe Beast\u201d) is introduced as a possible mentor figure, only to drift away inconsequentially. Annie, whom the cool-kid counselors dismiss as a country bumpkin, strikes up a friendship with another marginalized gal: a redhead (Ma\u00efw\u00e8ne Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my) coded as a lesbian and also resigned to the background rather expediently. <\/p>\n
\n\tA corny, self-aggrandizing coda \u2014 positioning the main events of the film within the context of Ernaux\u2019s career and the feminist awakenings of the following century \u2014 feels stretched-out and, frankly, somewhat obligatory. Still, after sticking Annie so deeply in the psychological trenches, gesturing to the light at the end of the tunnel is also welcome. A girl not only tells her story, but she lives to learn from it, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The resemblance between Judith Godr\u00e8che and her daughter Tess Barth\u00e9lemy \u2014 also the luminous lead of her mother\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[248609,49,48,5328,75,248610,337],"class_list":["post-676318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a-girls-story","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-judith-godreche","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}