Charly (2007) - film review

Nicolas, a 14-year-old boy living with foster parents, is inexplicably disturbed when he sees a postcard of Belle-Île-en-Mer.  On the spur of the moment, he runs away, determined to find the place for which he has acquired a sudden fascination.  After several days of hitchhiking, he arrives on the outskirts of Nantes where he meets a young woman named Charly.  The latter lives alone in a caravan on a patch of wasteland and resorts to prostitution to make a living.  Charly allows Nicolas to stay with her, providing he sticks religiously to the rules she lays down...

After making an impressive directorial debut with Demi-tarif (2003), a humorous portrait of a group of children trying to survive in Paris without adult support, actress-turned-director Isild Le Besco won further acclaim with this brutally realist coming of age drama.  Shot in just fifteen days on a shoestring budget, Charly has a raw cinéma vérité aesthetic that achieves a striking authenticity and depth which totally belie the film’s apparent narrative simplicity.  Crudely photographed with a digital handheld camera (by the director’s brother Jowan Le Besco) and employing natural locations which offer a limited palette of mainly dull earth colours, the film has the austere look of Maurice Pialat’s films, but there is also a tenderness which compels us to sympathise with the main characters, and also a smattering of downbeat humour which prevents their situation from appearing hopelessly grim.

Le Besco cast her younger brother Kolia Litscher in the lead male role (having previously employed him on Demi-tarif) - appropriately as it was Litscher’s own traumatic adolescence that inspired Le Besco to make the film.  For the female lead, the director called upon the services of a more experienced actor, Julie-Marie Parmentier, who invariably gives her best in modest auteur pieces of this kind, as is demonstrated by her heart-wrenching performance in Martin Provost’s Le Ventre de Juliette (2003).   Litscher and Parmentier complement one another perfectly - both possess a savage feral quality and a haunted vulnerability, attributes which render their misfit characters interesting and sympathetic.  They resemble not so much outcasts as castaways, urchins washed up on some remote shore.  They develop a mutual need for one another, but first they must learn to understand each other’s language, not an easy task when the only words that Nicolas seems to know are "I dunno" whilst Charly, with her near pathological obsession with order and cleanliness, gives a good impression of an officer in the SS.  Despite the obvious undercurrents of sexual tension, Nicolas and Charly look like a children playacting at being adults.  Theirs is a quaint parody of an adult relationship, but it is by playing the part of the adult that Nicolas learns what adult responsibility is.  When he finally leaves the sanctuary of Charly’s caravan he emerges as someone marching confidently towards adulthood.

Over the past decade, Isild Le Besco has established herself as one of France’s most highly regarded actresses, winning widespread acclaim through her collaborations with director Benoît Jacquot and several up-and-coming filmmakers.  If Demi-tarif and Charly are anything to go by, she looks set to have an equally distinguished career as an auteur filmmaker.  The authenticity that she brings to her performances is just as noticeable in her screenwriting and directing, but there is something else - a freshness, a willingness to challenge convention and push the boundaries in some unexpected places - in short, a touch of the maverick combined with a rigorous auteur sensibility that hasn’t been felt so keenly since the glorious years of the New Wave.   Could Le Besco’s directorial coming of age herald the beginning of an exciting new era in French cinema?

© James Travers 2010

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