30/05/18
The identity of Paula (Laetitia Dosch), our lively protagonist, isn’t quite as robust as Jeune Femme ’s title suggests: her status as a ‘Young Woman’ is challenged at every corner of Paris. We see her roam the streets of the French capital following a touchy breakup, struggling to transition from her twenty-something years to a fully-fledged adult. She’s in that sort of barren, ponderous strip of time where she’s young enough to go clubbing, but not young enough to enjoy it.
We’ve seen this type of breezy French lovesick-woman premise before (just look back to last year’s Let the Sun Shine In ), but we haven’t seen one with a protagonist with such a malleable identity. Sure, Juliette Binoche dawdled around her breezy French lovesick-woman comedy, feigning interest in lustful men, and there’s a whole host of Anna Karina-led breezy French lovesick-woman comedies to choose from - but director LĂ©onor Serraille skips the breeze and heads straight for the storm, mustering up a deceptively profound examination on that common feminine archetype - take that, Amelie!
Paula is a bundle of furor, who serves bark with bite and is as hapless as she is adamant. The first scene pictures her doing her head in on her (recently ex-)boyfriend’s apartment door, and her indignance doesn’t let up from there. But there’s a childlike innocence amid the racket, a sort-of goofball charm - Dosch occasionally turns this dorkishness into mawkishness (and I’m not just saying that because it rhymes), but she’s largely exquisite, tottering on that thin line between overbearing adolescence and simmering adulthood.
She steals a cat, botches an interview for the same job twice (here, Jeune Femme strays into the fantasy genre, as she still m anages to land the gig. Either that, or job-hunting in Norwich has left me jaded.), works towards salvaging an ambiguously-damaged maternal relationship, and yada yada. The sway of the plot doesn’t matter - what it means is all the rave.
Thankfully, there’s a ton of meaning to be found. Paula develops a friendship with a childhood acquaintance after a coincidental encounter - their relationship is one of Jeune Femme ’s sparse moments of unfiltered joy - but the resolution to that particular arc suggests that Paula, like her actions throughout most of the film, is clinging to a non-existent past.
Even the romantic interests have a point: the dynamic between Paula and her wishy-washy, slimy ex-boyfriend that strings her along evokes messy millennial years, while, in startling contrast, the burgeoning romance involving a work colleague has the pair unmistakably middle-aged and - by, God, - responsible(!). The colleague takes the dad-nap to the extreme, for instance, managing to claim some much-needed shut-eye during a spot of short-lived sex.
Not every strand is quite as successful: a babysitting gig Paula manages to pick up involves some half-baked class politics, even if the faux-motherly dynamic between our protagonist and the daughter she’s (meant to) look after is endearing, and surprisingly touching in the face of Paula’s ‘am I a kid pretending to be an adult or an adult pretending to be a kid’ conundrum. But these moments are brief, as the film flurries along into its next chance encounter.
Spruced up with some delightful French-isms (music, setting, tradition, genre cliches, and at one point a croissant walks up to the camera and plays the accordion), Jeune Femme gives off the impression of being a slight, wafery piece of work. But no - it’s a metatextual rendering of the aimless French female-driven rom-com, picking apart its protagonist’s every action and repurposing it towards assigning her identity. C’est chaud, charmant, et intelligent, and I may have lied about the talking croissant.
7/10