adolescence in the 1980s

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

In 2008, Sylvie Verheyde made her third feature film, Stella, a beautiful autobiographical portrait of a schoolgirl who spends her childhood in her parents’ bistro. In 2022, the director wrote the following with her son: Stella is in love. The young girl is now in high school and entrusts her nights to Bains Douches, a Parisian nightclub, where she meets a boy who makes her head spin. Enough to forget what is happening at home: his father (Benjamin Biolay) left with a young girl, the nicotine-infused despair of the mother (Marina Foïs), forced to sell the bistro and, soon, the class difference that digs misunderstanding between girlfriends.

There is a bias, quite clear, perhaps too much, which presides over the film: Sylvie Verheyde interweaves the harshness of the days with nocturnal reverie, the Bains Douches filmed like a bubble where the heroine takes revenge for the grayness of everyday life . The film sinks into its binary rhythm and its wise and icy reconstitution of the 1980s, where only the soundtrack seems to give the scenes their intensity. We are between the bubble-gum magic of The party (Claude Pinoteau, 1980) and the darkness of Graduate first (Maurice Pialat, 1978): between the two, the film hesitates, finally struggles as much to embody its love story as to paint an implacable and lucid picture of class relations.