Trois petites filles (2004) - film review

Three teenage girls decide to run away from their homes in Paris.  Their destination: the island of Corsica, where they hope to encounter film star Johnny Depp.  Pauline’s parents are separated, Lucie is bored with life, and Lilia is about to be shipped off to Algeria for an arranged marriage.  With nothing to lose, the three girls steal a credit card from an old woman and take the first ferry to Corsica.  There, they are befriended by a strange middle aged couple, Paolo and Laetitia…

Were it not for the contributions from its three adolescent leads (all promising young actresses), this awkward mix of social drama, thriller and teenage road movie would be a pretty vacuous affair that wouldn’t merit even a cursory viewing.  The film’s opening sequences do manage to convey the sense of teenage ennui and vulnerability pretty well, although it’s hard to overlook some of racial stereotyping.  Not a bad start, but unfortunately all this is pretty much undermined by what follows.

Having the three leading characters (supposedly) kill an old woman is not the best way of endearing them to a spectator, but it is their apparent sang froid and lack of guilt which is really unsettling.  Where’s the sense of panic and anxiety you’d expect to see in three typically neurotic teenage girls?  No, off they go to Corsica as if nothing much has happened.  And it’s at this point that the plot really comes off the rails.

What happens next is that the three girls – who, in case it has been forgotten, are running away from grown-ups – end up sharing a camp berth with a strange middle-aged couple (that’s strange in both senses of the word).  Certainly, Gérard Jugnot is a really nice enough kind of bloke, but is he really the kind of person three rebellious teenagers would willingly bed down with having turned their backs on their families and civilisation?   By the way, just before this happens, the three girls had just turned down a lift from a younger man because they thought he was a potential rapist.

After this bit of improbable inter-generation bonding, the film just feels so steeped in artifice and false emotion that it ceases to have any credibility as a piece of drama.  Things improve a little at the very end of the film, when the three girls are hunted down by the police, but even this seems heavy handed, overly sentimentalised and not the least bit convincing.

Trois petites filles was directed by Jean-Loup Hubert, whose best work is probably Le Grand chemin (1987).  The latter is a far more satisfying film which treats the fragile relationship between adults and children much more convincingly, and with far greater emotional impact.


© James Travers 2006

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