Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2022

[Chris Knipp]

AXELLLE ROPERT: PETITE SOLANGE (2021)


JADE SPRINGER IN PETITE SOLANGE

Ropert's drama of a teen's sufferings from her parents' divorce is a misfire

Axelle Ropert is esteemed by some French film fans for her work with her partner, oddball writer-director and actor Serge Bozon (La France, Tip Top), Her two first significant features as a director, The Wolberg Family and Miss and the Doctors are odd but interesting and also beautiful, with good scores and cinematography by Celine Bozon (Serge’s sister); her new one, Petite Solange lacks these virtues and is mostly just odd and surreal. Viewers/critics who simply find it a touching portrait of a teen girl's sufferings at her parents' breakup seem to be seeing the film they want to see, ignoring many oddities, wrong notes, and failures to connect. The costumes are off and the score is conventional and intrusive. Axelle Ropert has gone astray here.

Solange (Jade Springer) is a 13-year-old girl who lives with her older brother Romain (Grégoire Montana-Haroche) and her parents. Mum Aurelia (Léa Drucker) is an actress. Dad Antoine (Philippe Katherine) has a guitar shop. After 20 years of marriage, however, the parents' love seems to be fading. They quarrel, and eventually Antoine, terribly sad, starts sleeping on the living room couch. He assures Solange it's temporary; it isn't. In the course of a year, the couple decides to divorce and sell the house.

When the fighting stats, brother Roman sees the trouble coming and goes on a long trip to Spain. Solange hasn't that option and just stays in the heart of the family and suffers silently.

In the way Ropert illustrates these conventional developments she is even odder and more surreal than before. The casting signals this. Léa Drucker, who resembles a lower keyed Sandrine Kimberlain, plays her role of a moderately successful actress in the provincial world of Nantes as always cheerful and hopeful but a little insecure. Philippe Katherine is a peculiar dad. Jay Weissberg who reviews this film for Variety ("No Surprise That Divorce Is Hard on Teens in French Drama") thinks the actor resembles David Crosby; but if so, he's David Crosby coming apart at the seams, always seeming on the verge of tears. He is only safe among his guitars. His speech early on at the couple's 20th anniversary celebration is peculiar: notably, his description of his two kids bears no relation to reality. The problem with Jade Springer is that she has a sad, drawn look from the start, so her decline holds no surprise and awakens no sympathy. She's a sad sack who gets sadder.

Jade is held in check by the filmmaker and the examples of her coming apart are feeble. She tries to connect with a cool boy with long hair who Solange and her best friend Lili (Marthe Léon) both long for. He noodles around on an electric keyboard at school and they agree they don't like the noodling but they like him. Solange talks to him a few times and longs to get him a deal on a keyboard for home from her dad. But this goes nowhere. Solange shoplifts a red brassiere much too large for her (this awkwardly calls attention to how flat-chested she is) and successfully begs off the shop attendant from calling her parents.

The climax (though it's a letdown) comes when she's made to read a Verlaine poem aloud in French class and stumbles doing it and looks even more pathetic than usual. Later the teacher even calls her parents to tell them their daughter has started weeping while reading Verlaine. But in the scene, she does not appear to weep. The film is full of little disconnects like this. And again, so what? Maybe she's just moved by poetry.

The final sequence, where Solange declares, very unconvincingly, that she has come to terms with her parents' being apart now, may be the strangest of all. It seems Solange has been somewhere else but this is not made clear. She shows up at the now sold, near-empty house and sits in the patio with her brother and parents. They say she should not have come. Why they would say that and what's been going on must be on the cutting-room floor.

As several reviewers have pointed out, notably Weissberg, the film's time is out of joint. That is, while its current status is signaled by cell phones and other contemporary details, the get-up of the people is reminiscent of the eighties, when Ropert grew up - perhaps signaling, awkwardly, an autobiographical element. It's just another way the film is off-kilter.

This is a stilted, airless, disjointed film that appears conventional on the surface but just a little below is slightly off key. The coming-of-age plot-line lacks the interesting twists and turns of Ropert's more complex earlier films to drive toward a simplistic message about teen life, yet that message is weakly conveyed because the teen in question doesn't change strongly or visibly enough. And why is the family's name Maserai, which Solange tells someone is the mark of an Italian luxury car? It's just another of the film's inexplicable red herrings.

Petite Solange, 86 mins., debuted at the fest of odd flicks, Locarno, Aug. 21, 2021, showing also at Vienna. It opened in France Feb. 2, 2021 and was screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-FLC Rendez-Vous series (Mar. 7, 2022 showing). No Metascore yet but the average so far is 63%. AlloCiné press rating 3.6 (72%); audience rating 2.7 (54%).