Jeune Femme

Paula is banging her head against a door. The man she lived with for ten years is inside and does not open it. She wakes in hospital. She has a cat, a bag and nothing else. She is back in Paris but there is no one here she knows. She calls on her mother; the woman does not open the door. On the metro someone takes her for an old schoolfriend and Paula does not correct it. She looks for work. She sells underwear in a shopping centre, then minds a child. To everyone she meets she describes herself a little differently. Léonor Serraille writes and directs; it is her first feature. Laetitia Dosch plays Paula; Grégoire Monsaingeon and Souleymane Seye Ndiaye are in the cast. It is a French production. The film won the Caméra d'Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the award for a first feature. The narrative rests on a single character and the camera hardly ever leaves her. The matter it treats is starting again; the film gives it not as an awakening but as a state of falling and getting up over and over. The narrative does not make Paula likeable; she lies, she shouts, and she exhausts people. Laetitia Dosch became known through the part and the performance carries the whole film. Paris is not touristic inside the narrative; shops, the metro and cheap hotels. Its limit is structure; the narrative is in pieces, there is no plot, and the ending gives no closure. Who it is for: viewers who like French independent cinema and films built on a single character. Who it is not for: it is scattered, the character tiring, and the ending unresolved.