STÉPHANE LAFLEUR: TU DORS NICOLE (2014)


JULIANNE CÔTÉ IN TU DORS NICOLE

Girl drifts through a Quebec summer heatwave

Nicole (Julianne Côté) is spending the summer in the family's ample, ordinary house -- marble floors; walls like Baltimore row house Formstone -- while her parents are away on vacation. She sleeps around a little (no second night), pilfers from the charity clothing store where she works, and hangs out with her best girlfriend Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent), with whom for a while she plans a trip to Iceland.

Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur delivers his third feature in Tu dors Nicole ("You're sleeping, Nicole"), a depiction of a young woman's transitional summer. Aki Kaurismäki, Fernando Eimbcke, and Jim Jarmusch are mentioned as sources, but while the action is dry and aimless, the characters and situation are more nearly mainstream. These are less extreme French Canadians than Xavier Dolan's; they seem mostly just Canadians who speak French. The action consists of short vignettes that are connected by fades to black; the well-crafted visuals are in black and white shot on 35mm film. As Mike D'Angelo, an early advocate in The Dissolve, who compares Tu dors to (the also black and white) Frances Ha, put it, "Tu Dors Nicole doesn’t have anything much on its mind past a series of amusing riffs. That’s fine, though. Pleasure is pleasure."

Be fully prepared for whimsy and pleasure is what you'll have. There is no other agenda to be met, and if you insist upon one you may wind up wondering what the festival raves are about. As in Kaurismäki, there are running gags, notably little Martin (Godefroy Reding), who Nicole used to babysit for, a small blond kid whose voice has dropped -- way down-- prematurely (courtesy of Alexis Lefebvre), and wants her as his girlfriend and is willing to wait; a forever-tricky bike lock; a man who circles around the neighborhood at night trying to lull his baby to sleep, a ploy that works for him (he carries a large take-out coffee) but not the baby.

Early on the equation alters when Nicole's older brother Rémi (Marc-André Grondin) turns up to use the house's living room and basement for his garage band to record an album. Nicole may be interested in his attractive new drummer, JF (Francis La Haye), a possibility threatened because Rémi is always alienating his band members. She is stuck, symbolized, as Alissa Simon points out in Variety, by the way her bike lock is so hard to undo. Things aren't going well. Aside from having been dumped at graduation by her boyfriend for getting very drunk, she gets fired, and Véronique reneges on the Iceland trip, leaving Nicole feeling betrayed. No progress with the drummer. That she's the best pants-cuffer in the country doesn't quite make life matter. Thanks to others' unfair judgments, her life seems paved with missteps. Like many young people, Nicole defines being slightly disgruntled as, for now, the best way to look at life.

The dialogue is well written and each short scene is nicely paced and nicely shot. Montreal musician Remy Nadeau-Aubin and the group Organ Mood make the music pleasant to listen to. Stéphane Lafleur is clearly another young French Canadian filmmaker to watch.

Tu dors Nicole ("You're Sleeping, Nicole"), 93 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2014 and has since been shown at Toronto and nearly two dozen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC/MoMA New Directors/New Films series. A Kino Lorber release in the US (29 May at Lincoln Center), it opens in Paris 18 March. (AlloCiné press rating was a very good 3.7; Les Inrocks liked it, Cahiers typically not as much.

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