Director
Virginie Despentes
Year
2011
Run Time
87
min
Country
France
Language
French
PROGRAM Time
minutes
CONTENT WARNING:
A love story of two women who meet up in their late forties and attempt to retrieve the romance they had in their youth.
This film is presented in French with English subtitles.
Twelve years after her explosive debut, Baise‐moi, Virginie Despentes is back with the decidedly lighter tale of two middle‐aged women struggling to rekindle their teen‐aged romance after three decades. 40‐ year‐old Gloria (Béatrice Dalle) is still a volatile, art‐punk drifter in the north‐eastern city of Nancy. Frances (Emmanuelle Béart) has settled into a comfortably bourgeois life of marriage (to a gay man) and a career in television. With trouble brewing at work and a husband struggling with writer’s block, however, Frances impetuously summons Gloria to stay with her in Paris, searching for the magic she felt as a rebellious, love‐struck teenager. Youth’s poignant intensity versus middle‐aged nostalgia are evoked in alternating scenes from Gloria and Frances’ young love circa 1984, and the present. With passionate performances by Soko and Clara Ponsot (who play the young Gloria and Frances), a Lydia Lunch cameo and a kickass soundtrack (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bérurier Noir), this is a film for anybody who has ever wondered about the possibility – or wisdom – of trying to recapture their first big love."
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