a tragic and sunny adolescence

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

At 15, she still has a baby tooth. Little Australian model, she goes to college, in a skirt and white blouse; she follows her violin lessons and her treatment. She lives like a glass cage in a beautiful house on the outskirts of Sydney. She listens to her parents, sympathetic bourgeois who do not spare their efforts to understand her: he (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist, she (Essie Davis) is a former concert artist who closed the lid of her piano on a promising career at the birth of her daughter. At 15, Milla (Eliza Scanlen) suffers from cancer. One day, in a train station, she feels attracted by the emptiness which opens under her feet, just on the edge of the platform, when the suburban train arrives which will take her to school. Death, at this age, is an option. Live or die. Go out with X or Y. To go or not to go to the promo party. It is all the same. Except for Milla.

It is then that Moses emerges, not from the waves, but from the street where he spends his time as a dealer. He is skinny like a wolf, thin legs, protruding veins, minnow belly. His mother, a dog groomer, kicked him out. We can understand her, he must have made her see all the colors. He doesn’t even have the right to see his little brother anymore. Arms outstretched, Moses literally blocks his body to slip between the platform and the RER of the Antipodes. Milla is saved. At least this time.

A melodrama, you will say? No, a film full of grace, fine, funny, tragic and sunny (beautiful light by director of photography Andrew Commis), adapted from a play (Babyteeth) by the author, Rita Kalnejais, and the director Shannon Murphy, of which it is the first cinema film after a career marked by her work for television and the stage. She shows an absolutely astounding fluidity and sense of rhythm, chaining (not without a few forgivable lengths) the strong moments and the weak times without knowing very well if the seconds are not more important than the first.

“A visceral emotion”

Cut into chapters of unequal length, her film zaps from one scene to another more than following a thread, jostling time as for Milla, caught between adolescence and illness. All that remains is narrative islands linked by the force of a compassion that never abandons the film, without overwhelming it … “I wanted the spectators to have a visceral emotion”, confides the director. Wish granted.

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