Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 10:15 pm 
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SUSANNE LINDON: SPRING BLOSSOM/SEIZE PRINTEMPS (2020) - RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2021

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ARNAUD VALOIS, SUSANNE LINDON IN SEIZE PRINTEMPS

A light French take on May-December romance

May-December with a difference, because in this film Susanne (writer-director Susanne Lindon, now 20) is a mature 16 and Raphaël (Arnaud Valois) is a youthful 35 and the guy doesn't seem to an older viewer very old himself. Not at least till, that is, we do the arithmetic and realize Raphaël's 19 years Susanne's senior and thus more than twice her age. Yet Raphaël seems to approach Susanne in a sweet, courtly manner, like a sublime platonic object and the affair never (apparently) becomes sexual and seems determined not to.

It's no mystery why she'd fall in love with him. He's handsome and a bit (but not too) brooding, with a nice close-cropped beard and curly hair. It's not so clear why he'd fall for her. Out of politeness, out of boredom, because she's cute (rather like a young Charlotte Gainsbourg) and shy but poised, with an authentic smile. For him it's a beautiful but impossible flirtation. For her it's wonderful, until it's too much.

Thus somehow on the face of it Lindon avoids #MeToo issues - which may be provocative, nowadays, in itself. But in doing so, she gives us something simple and classic if also, because the writing is a little juvenile and the film is short and ends abruptly and is not just admirably minimalist as it wants to be, ultimately a bit sketchy and wan. But, however a product of privilege, it's also a talented debut that hints of more and hopefully better to come when the precocity blends with experience.

Is this a platonic relationship - or are the hand and head dances in unison, as stylized as something in a Eugène Green film, a way of symbolically reenacting foreplay and sex? The musical and dance numbers in the film at least are its way of expressing how the emotions soar.

I was reminded of a long-ago Paris literary hit that came to the US when in the mid-fifties, at only 18, Françoise Sagan published Bonjour Tristesse, her instantly famous precocious short novel about the 17-year-old Cécile who has a summer affair in front of her indulgent, wealthy parents with a 20-something man on the French Riviera. Both Bonjour Tristesse and Seize printemps ("Sixteen Springs" a title redolent of John Hughes) have an air of privilege, in the works themselves and the works' origins from a world of well-off Parisian Bobo's ("bourgeois bohemians"), or better in this case, since Susanne Lindon, who wrote this at 15 and has produced and starred in it at 20, is the daughter of the two most famous and admired actors of France, Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain. Doubtless they live in a "grand appartement bourgeois," using the term not as it's bandied about in rental listings but in its grander sense of a big old many-roomed high-ceilinged apartment in one of the best parts of Paris - in Susanne's case in the 18e arrondissement, Montmartre, a short walk from the Théâtre de l'Atelier where Raphaël is acting in a play when Susanne spots him at the nearby café and begins to spy on him.

In this short feature Susanne (the writer-director) is a cute, boyish girl with her own style of tight faded jeans and mannish white shirts. She is bored with her lyçée, with her classmates, and with boys, which at a party she rates all as 5's, on a scale of one to ten. So she looks for someone older and quickly finds him. But she will not even ride on his new red Vespa with him, a fair indication that she's not planning to go to bed with him either, that more dangerous ride. In the current atmosphere, when so many male abusers have been unmasked, we may forget the old French tradition of an older person (granted, more often a woman with a young man) teacher a youth the ways of love.

Susanne, in the film, makes out with a mirror like the boys in French Kissers/Les beaux gosses (Vincent Lacoste's debut), perhaps the sexiest thing in the movie. Her actual kisses from Raphaël or her are courtly pecks, infinitely sweet, but carefully restrained, hardly more than merely more fraught versions of the air-pecks she and all her girlfriends exchange outside the lycée every day. She consults with her dad (Frédéric Pierrot; with him and her mom Florence Viala and sister Rebecca Marder she gets on perfectly) about whether men like skirts better and starts wearing them, and trying to put on eye makeup (with messy results at first). The chaste trysts proceed: sharing a sugary drink, meeting for breakfast, a walk (with the dance moves), a visit to the theater stage (with the dance moves cozier). And then Susanne gets cold feet, and cries to her mom. And boom! It's over.

There is a strong feeing that more could have been done with this; that its success is a seamless mixture of tasteful restraint and limited imagination. But the classic French taste is there. Privilege is also nurturing of talent. Françoise Sagan never did anything else as well known as Bonjour Tristesse For Susanne Lindon hopefully this may be only the precocious beginning.

Seize printemps/Spring Blossom, 73 mins., was a 2020 Cannes selection shown at Angoulême in Sept.; shown in at least 15 other international festivals including Toronto, Athens, Hamburg, Mill Valley, Chicago, Busan, Vienna and closing film at Glasgow. In the US, a KimStim release. Screened online at home for this review as part of the all-virtual 2021 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Mar. 8, 2021.

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FRÉDÉRIC PIERROT AS THE FATHER, SUSANNE LINDON AS THE DAUGHTER IN SPRING BLOSSOM

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


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