LOU AZIOSMANOFF IN MY BLUE-EYED GIRL

French seaside, family summer, a girl's secret

My online encyclopedia tells me Saint-Martin-de-Ré is a commune in the Charente-Maritime department in southwestern France, one of the 10 communes located on the Île de Ré. That's the setting of Shalimar Preuss's lazy family summer film, which strives for documentary naturalism but is weakly structured. Various members of several interrelated families are gathered here at a comfortably big summer house near the sea. Maybe because it's an island or because this is a movie, we feel as if we're visiting an earlier, simpler time. Not much of compuers or electronics here. Big excitement comes from sailing lessons and the shock is some of the girls discovering the 17-year-old Maude (Lou Aziosmanoff), the "pretty" or "good" girl or kid of the title Ma belle gosse, is secretly corresponding with an inmate in the nearby prison, who has told her he is 35, and whom she's enamored of and has a photo of. Her little half-brother Vadim is the only one who knows, but several sisters or half-sisters or cousins come upon the bundle of letters by accident.

This incident, which in any case never leads to anything exciting, is buried in all the sequences of aimless summer fiddling around, checker games, meals, ice cream, playing in the garden, examinations of marine life, treks through mud, and so forth, which are certainly all authentic-feeling with their desultory action, intergenerational conflicts, and seamless editing of not very significant moments into an all-too-realistic whole. But all this leads to no emergence of a narrative structure. The film achieves less than it might have because of a lack of effective editing. Another way of putting it is that this is a documentary of French traditional family life at a peaceful summer resort, but that the material gathered lacked focus, cohesion, or interest and so the story of the girls's secret prison inmate pen pal is added, but it's not enough. Hand-held camera used throughout, with an effect of obtrusive jerkiness. For scenes with so little happening, images need to be a lot more beautiful than this to justify our looking at them at such length. Ambient sound is recorded with only existing light in the shooting (so you can't follow the checker game).

Characters are not well-differentiated, least of all the mother. Some of the kids are very cute. This is a film of atmosphere, waiting for something to happen. Contrast: Celina Murga: A Week Alone (2007), FCS 2007, a brilliant and powerful Argentinian study of children left alone in the summer at a posh gated community and getting gradually into trouble.

My Blue-Eyed Girl/Ma belle gosse, 80 mins.,debuted at Rotterdam. French release date: 26 November 2012, according to IMDb. No reviews listed on Allociné. VOD release. Screened for this review as part of the Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Feb. 28-Mar. 10. This seemingly negligible film is getting three public screenings, Mon. Mar. 4, 10:20pm – IFC; Tues. Mar. 5, 4pm – WRT; Sun. Mar. 10, 4:40pm - WRT for its "North American Premiere."

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