The stylish feature debut from Céline Devaux explores the life of businesswoman Jeanne, her louche ex-lover and a strangely seductive new acquaintance
Parisian film-maker and illustrator Céline Devaux, whose award-winning shorts have been shown at Cannes and Venice, now makes her feature debut with a salty romcom character study; it is deceptively slight, though leaning heavily on a certain kind of quirkiness, and undoubtedly intriguing.
Jeanne is an entrepreneur who has fallen into a depression caused by the death of her mother and the recent bizarre collapse of her business; she has an inner anxiety-voice represented by Devaux’s own sketches of the cartoon-ghost in her head, always nagging at her. An undersea device for hoovering up microplastics, into which Jeanne invested every cent of her own money, became unmoored and Jeanne was humiliatingly shown on the TV news as she desperately dived fully clothed into the sea in a doomed attempt to save it. She is played by Blanche Gardin – who was Léa Seydoux’s producer and best friend in Bruno Dumont’s media satire France – and brings a certain kind of not-yet-irretrievable jadedness to the role.
