CINÉ+ CLUB – WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 AT 8:50 P.M. – FILM
At 15, she still has a baby tooth. A petite Australian model, she goes to college, in a skirt and white blouse; she follows her violin lessons and her treatment. She lives like in a glass cage in a beautiful house in the suburbs of Sydney. She listens to her parents, sympathetic bourgeois, who spare no effort to understand her: he (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist, she (Essie Davis) is a former concert performer, who has 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 drawn to the void that opens up under her feet, just at the edge of the platform, just as the commuter train arrives that will take her to school. Death, at this age, is an option. Live or die. Date X or Y. To go or not to go to the prom party. It is all the same. Except for Milla.
It is then that Moses (Toby Wallace) appears, not from the waves, but from the street, where he spends his time dealing. Lean as a wolf, skinny legs, bulging veins. His mother, a dog groomer, kicked him out. We can understand her, he must have made her see all the colors. Arms outstretched, Moses literally blocks his body to slip between the platform and the Antipodes RER. Milla is saved. At least for this time.
Avoid the inevitable
A melo? No, a film full of grace, fine, funny, tragic and sunny, adapted from a play (babyteeth) by author Rita Kalnejais and director Shannon Murphy, who demonstrates an absolutely astounding fluidity and sense of rhythm, linking (not without some forgivable lengths) high and low moments, without we know very well whether the latter are not more important than the former.
Milla is not just another adolescent chronicle, even if it is steeped in the darkness of illness. A funny and serious film, it leaves an enviable place for the adults who surround the young girl, protect her as best they can, to thwart the inevitable. While Milla is soon snatched up by Moses like a planet entering a new orbit, the father and mother on the contrary seek to tie her down, going so far as to welcome Moses under their roof, despite their repugnance towards the young man. . The equation is simple: whatever is good for Milla will be good for them.
If Eliza Scanlen, already spotted in the HBO series Sharp Objects, radiates the feature film, Toby Wallace, Marcello-Mastroianni Prize in 2019 in Venice for this demonic and angelic role, composes a totally ambiguous character, both cute and unbearable, leading the young girl in her excesses and her desire. “I wanted the spectators to have a visceral emotion”, says the director. Wish granted.
Milla, by Shannon Murphy. With Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis (Aust., 2019, 1:58).