Louise by the Shore

The end of summer. Everyone is leaving a small seaside town. Louise, an old woman, misses the last train and is left there alone. She does not try to get back; she decides to spend the winter. On the deserted beach she builds herself a shelter, collects shells, learns to live with the tide, and starts talking to a dog. Jean-François Laguionie writes and directs. The visual method is watercolour. The backgrounds run, their edges are undefined, and the colours bleed into each other; figure and place are drawn in the same texture. It is a deliberate refusal of the sharpness of digital animation. The narrative begins as a Robinson story and steadily becomes memory. Louise's effort to get through the winter and images from her past interleave, and the film does not say which of them is actually happening. Laguionie is one of the oldest figures in French animation, working for over forty years, and made this film in his seventies. Age, solitude and looking back are directly present in it. It runs seventy five minutes and never speeds up. Who it is for: viewers who like animation for adults, handmade visual language and quiet narrative. Who it is not for: this is not for children, almost nothing happens, and the film ends without reaching a conclusion.