Adolescents

Emma and Anais are friends at thirteen. Both live in Brive, a small French city. Emma's family is educated and there are books at home; her mother wants to steer her daughter's life. In Anais's house money is short, her mother is ill, and the girl's plan is to start working early. The camera follows them until they are eighteen. Exams, first boyfriends, arguments, the choice of a trade and a distance that keeps opening. They grow up in the same city and the same future is not waiting for them. Sebastien Lifshitz directs. The shooting took five years. It is a French production. The documentary won best documentary, best editing and best sound at the 46th Cesar Awards, and took the Louis Delluc Prize for 2020. The matter it treats is class; what parts the two girls is not their character but the house they were born into. The film records the families too; conversations with the parents are inside the narrative. The narrative keeps the France of the period in the background; the attacks in the country and the elections come in through screens. The camera comments in no scene and no narrator is used. Showing five years without a break makes the physical change of the girls part of the story. The film does not idealise friendship and is not afraid to show the two of them growing strange to each other. The ending gives two separate roads and does not say which is the good one. Its limit is duration; the narrative is very long, sections repeat, and there is no large event. Who it is for: viewers who like long form documentary and French cinema. Who it is not for: it is long, uneventful, and the ending rueful.