Bar des rails (1991) - film review

Richard, 16, lives with his mother, a dressmaker, in a dull provincial town.  One of his mother’s clients, Marion, a young single mother, is attracted to Richard and makes several attempts to seduce him.  He, nervous about this first amorous encounter, at first rejects Marion, but then realises that he might be in love with her...

With this sensitive and brutally unsentimental portrayal of an adolescent’s sexual awakening, Cédric Kahn makes an impressive directorial debut.  In stark contrast to most coming of age dramas, even serious French ones, Kahn tacitly eschews the more familiar, rose-tinted stereotypical view of teenage romance and paints something much more believable.

This film use realistic characters in a realistic setting to convey both the trauma and confusion that a first romance can have on a withdrawn teenage boy.  Instinctively aware of – and indeed hoping to experience – an idealised view of love, the film’s central character, Richard, discovers not just the pleasure of physical love, but all the psychological torment that accompanies it.  He is old enough to perform the act, but not nearly mature enough to comprehend its significance; love is a mystery he simply cannot fathom.

With its unusual, elliptical structure and intimate photography, Bar des rails is a uniquely personal film, probably with a strong auto-biographical element to it.  It reveals in its director both a keen observer of the human condition and a daring willingness to portray what he sees with uncompromising, unromanticised sense of truth.

© James Travers 2003

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