YOUNG ACTORS PAULINE ÉTIENNE AND CLÉMENT ROUSSIER POSE FOR A PHOTO CALL

The restless age, and restless old age

Laurrent Perreau's Le bel âge is a coming of age story with a failed love affair and a swimming competition, but most of all it's a mood piece about an old man and a young girl, his lonely granddaughter, who share a French chateau and reluctantly discover they have things in common. A dodgy structure explains the only fair-to-good reviews the film has received in France since it opened at the end of 2009. Despite a disjointedness as "restless" and unfocused as its young female lead, the film's still a sensitive dual character study, and it nails the pain of young romance.

At 17, Claire, an orphan who lives with her grumpy old grandfather, Maurice, is training for swim races but goes to a club late at night to meet or avoid boys. She walks over to Thomas to avoid two other boys and makes him pretend they're friends. This intimacy makes Thomas fall instantly in love with her.

When Claire leaves the club after her first meeting with Thomas she has a bike accident, cuts her head, and discovers Maurice's dog, Morphée, has been killed on the road. The sequence is symbolic, perhaps of the harshness and isolation of her and her grandfather's lives; it's an opportunity to show how stubborn and independent Claire is. Thomas works at a casino "spying" on people by watching surveillance camera monitors behind the scenes and she gets in the habit of hanging out with him there.

But Claire is like Maurice, her lonely grandfather, though she goes so far as to hide under the bed at times to avoid contact with him. She's used to fending for herself and feeling abandoned emotionally; Thomas' romanticism is a bit much for her. In time, she breaks his heart. And then she realizes what a terrible mistake she has made.

Meanwhile though Claire is not attending her lycée, she's working daily to prepare for swim competition. Her coach Rafaël (Eric Caravaca) is teaching her how to use her emotion and avoid spooking herself with too much mental analysis before matches, and her times, though irregular, are improving overall. Though not as rich in atmosphere as those in Céline Sciamma's 2007 film about girl swimmers Water Lillies/'Naissance des pièvres, Restless' swim sequences are convincing.

The talented young Pauline Étienne (Claire) is a surprisingly good match for the cinema giant Michel Piccoli (Maurice). Unfortunately most of the time they are not in the same film, until somewhat artificially this spry man has a fall and is hospitalized for a while, as a result of which he winds up telling Clair the true story of how he got a bullet in his shoulder long ago. The revelation creates a deeper bond. A mysterious brooding role is assigned to Piccoli here that he takes on very well, even if the unhappy old guy on an estate is a bit of a Eurofilm cliché by now (more fully developed with Trintignant's character in Kieslowski's Red). Who Maurice is, what his WWII experiences exactly were, how he got here, are unexplained. He has only one friend, a hooker named Madeleine (Johanna ter Steege), who gives him (slight) sexual satisfaction and comfort; but he rejects even her. Still a good role for Piccoli, now 84 but very much alive; he even does a charming little turn performing Yvette Gilbert's classic Belle Époque song "Le Fiacre."

Restless is beautifully photographed by Céline Bozon, who also did two other Rendez-Vous 2010 films, Kahn's Regrets and Axelle Ropert's The Wolberg Family/La famille Wolberg. Understated as it is, the film surprises with its rich mise-en-scène, which jumps from swimming pool to chateau to Thomas' flat to nightclub to gambling casino, and people appear without being identified in an interesting way, especially people associated with Thomas, who indirectly reveal that despite his love of poetic prose passages and dreams of romantic idyls, he's not the loner Claire and Maurice are. With its mix of physicality and the ethereal this movie occasionally evokes Claire Denis, though without quite her warmth.

The real French title Le bel âge, The Best Age, is doubly ironic, since the focus is alternately on the torments, isolation, and uncertainties of two periods of life, adolescence and old age, neither of them seen as particularly happy, though the story ends with an embrace of granddaughter and grandfather and a shot of Clair exploring a new land, perhaps in search of Thomas.



Restless/Le bel âge, also known by its introductory title "L'Insurgée" (The Rebellious Girl) opened in Paris December 30, 2009 and is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, March 2010.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.