Movies Reviews

Belle Épine – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Mar 19, 2011, 14:27 GMT

Sensitive and evocative, this slow-burner depends too much on the audience’s ability to pull out the emotions of the filmmakers.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s debut feature film “Belle Épine” joined the line-up in the current New Directors New Films festival in New York City. Translating into “Dear Prudence’ the film is about two girls who are anything but prudent.

Prudence (Léa Seydoux) and Maryline (Agathe Schlenker) become instant friends after they are arrested and strip-searched for shoplifting. Prudence has lost her parents to death and business and spends her time rattling around in her posh living quarters. Maryline is street smart, tough and self-reliant. She knows a good thing when she sees it and she sticks with Prudence.

The two unlikely friends are brought together by loneliness and disaffection that does not improve much as the film goes on. Maryline introduces Prudence to her motorcycle racing friends and the two bump into a couple gruesome motorcycle accidents, but the accidents are sanitized to a great degree.

In fact, the nasty motorcyclists themselves are sanitized, as are Prudence and Maryline. A bit of sexual experimentation and coming of age (is there a hint of homoeroticism there?) but it comes too little in the end.

Perhaps the motorcycle genre does not translate well from France to America, but those bikers are tame. Too tame. Marlon Brando and the wild ones were a lot more scary and that was sixty years ago. As for Prudence and Maryline, the street people of Italian neorealism were a lot more real and that was sixty years ago as well, although this movie does echo some of the searching, probing scenes of Bertolucci’s more recent “The Dreamers.”

Viewing the film also takes one into “mumblecore” territory and echoes the understated sense of loneliness in the similarly minimalist “Wendy and Lucy.” This simplicity can be good or bad. The good side is that the film is as straightforward and truthful as any film ever made. The bad side is that the film is just plain slow.

There is too little happening and what does happen is predictable, two dimensional and, well, light. Most of the people watching will have had life experiences more intense than the experiences shown in the film or relayed to the audience by the characters in the film.

The screenplay poses adults as the ongoing enemies of the teens, or at least non-participants in the growth of the kids. Maybe there is some truth in this, but if it is going to be the core of a film there had better be the next James Dean in there somewhere. There is no James Dean in this film, just two girls who like they are actually doing all right except for having a terrible time at parties.

The motorcycle scenes are based on the “Rungis Circuit” which was a real place existing in France in the 1970s. The scene was a combination of mod scooters and low-powered motorcycles where kids were, indeed, killed in accidents.

However, to the extent that this film tries to mix the old Rungis vision with the hyper alienation teens and twenty-somethings feel nowadays it is unsuccessful. Things are a lot more intense now and the old vision does not cut it.

Today’s gangs are on Twitter, not on the streets. Seydoux is an experienced performer, having done a couple dozen films in five years, but she is still looking for the right part. Alternatively, perhaps she is looking for an experienced director to push her. Zlotowski did not push her in this film, Seydoux was allowed to do her own thing and did what was natural---she took it easy. Her life was not supposed to be easy.

Overall, a good try by professionals who will be around for a while but who have their best work still ahead of them.

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Directed by: Rebecca Zlotowski
Written by: Marcia Romano (collaborating writer), Rebecca Zlotowski
Starring: Léa Seydoux, Anaïs Demoustier and Agathe Schlenker 
Release Date: New Directors New Films Festival---New York
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 80 minutes
Country: France
Language: French
Color: Color