It doesn’t have the best of titles (translated, it’s “Olga’s Chignon”, and I had to look up what a chignon was, lol – merci, Apple’s Dashboard Dictionary, lol – I understand it’s an homage to Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee which I haven’t seen), but I was surprised to find myself completely absorbed by this movie, despite just catching its opening credits in time and having a bunch of other things to do. French movies often do this to me, I’m usually astonished by my ability to follow them without 100% attention to the subtitles.

A lot of people have apparently compared the director to Eric Rohmer, and I’ve only seen one Rohmer movie, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, which is one of my all-time favourites, and I have a season of his movies queued in Blockbuster, but I still understand the comparison, even though my experience of Rohmer seems limited to his apparently least known work (it’s the only one, I think, unavailable or at least not coming soon on DVD with English subtitles).

To me, the synopsis I read wasn’t so accurate – IMDb says, “Moving drama about two children who live with their widowed father in a state of barely subdued grief while coping with their own adolescent problems.” These characters are barely children. They’re having sex, they’ve had sex, they’re getting pretty horny in general. And the widowed father is quite a minor character. To me, the crux of the movie is the son, who falls in love with a stranger and follows her, tries to get close to her, hilariously and tragically. The scene in which he realises he can’t have her almost made me bawl, it’s beautifully sad, especially as his sister walks in on the tail-end of it, asking, “Why the long face?”

I’ll definitely look out for this guy’s work in the future. He’s only 2 years older than me, frankly I’m envious, lol.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 11:59 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.