For her debut feature as a director, French actor Sandrine Kiberlain has decided not to take the easy route and instead go for something a bit bolder. Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien (A Radiant Girl) is a familiar story told in an unfamiliar way.
Kiberlain returns to the grim history of the Jews of Paris under the Nazi occupation but filters it all – well, mostly all – through the eyes of a young drama student whose entire focus is on an upcoming audition to gain entry to the conservatory.
As the film opens Irène (Rebecca Marder) is rehearsing Marivaux’s L’Épreuve with a fellow drama student. She faints. It might be part of the performance or maybe Irène is just so overwhelmed with the drama of it all that her body has let her down. After the rehearsal Irène leaves with the handsome Jo (Ben Attal), mild flirting going on between the two.
Later, another young man, gauche Gilbert (Jean Chevalier) attempts to impress Irène with some unsuccessful low-level wooing. What should I do about Gilbert, Irène asks her worldly bohemian grandma, Marceline (Françoise Widhoff), when she gets back to the family apartment. Marceline tells her, in so many words, to play the field a bit but not to be too horrible to Gilbert. Let him down slowly.
Later, as part of the investigation into her fainting spells Irène has her eyes examined by a handsome doctor, Jacques (Cyril Metzger), and immediately falls for him. As a way of being close to him for a bit longer she pretends she cannot read the eye chart. Which is why she ends up with glasses even though they make her vision blurry.
While the film follows this pretty young woman’s emotional ups and downs – Jo, Gilbert, Jacques, Marivaux, the conservatory, the life thespian, and who knows what in the future – it also paints a tender portrait of Irène’s home life with her family. Meanwhile, the Nazis are putting their plans for the de-Jewification of Paris into place. First forcing Jews to have their papers stamped with a racial identifier. Confiscating radios and bicycles, anything that encourages contact with the outside world. Then comes the yellow star, which the newly identified Jews have to wear visibly. Irène barely seems to notice. Those specs are of course a metaphor.
The approaching calamity is seen almost entirely through Irène’s eyes. She is a young woman being wooed and falling in love and making plans for the future. Kiberlain has written her, and Marder plays her, as the “universal young woman”. For stretches at a time this film does not feel as if it is set in the 1940s at all. Kiberlain and her DP Guillaume Schiffman shoot everything bright and clean and modern. The soundtrack mixes in anachronisitc music by Philip Glass and Tom Waits with more obvious “period drama” offerings. Irène is as much the modern miss as the 1940s setting will allow, with carefully chosen clothes, hair and make-up deliberately eliding that era with ours. The shocks, when they come, are not be dulled by distance.
The film exists in two realms – Irène’s of the proto-modern, forward-looking, vivacious “young girl who’s doing OK” (which is how the French title translates), and that of the father, who is fretting constantly about what the Nazis will do next.
It’s the nervous dad (André Marcon) who’s right, of course, and eventually the two realms collide, at first artistically – the shock of a yellow star on Irène’s clothing. Ultimately more consequentially.
There are none so blind as those that will not see is the harsh lesson learned – those glasses again. Does this make Irène at some level guilty, even if it’s just of being a pretty, talented young woman who thought she was doing OK? Guilty of being a silly young girl. It’s an uneasy way to leave a film like this. For all the fizzing cuteness the spectacular Rebecca Marder puts into the character of Irène, there is a lingering aftertaste that’s not entirely pleasant.
Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien (A Radiant Girl) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
