Brief Crossing

A ferry crosses from England to France over one night. Thomas is sixteen, travelling alone for the first time, and unable to talk to anyone. In the dining room he ends up at a table with an Englishwoman called Alice. She is a good deal older than him and she does the talking: men, marriage, love, what women want. Thomas listens. As the night goes on the conversation moves somewhere else, and when he walks off the ship in the morning he does not know how much of what he was told was true. Catherine Breillat directs; eighty-four minutes. It was made for television. It consists almost entirely of two people talking, and Breillat's usual question is the same one here: who holds the desire and who holds the power.