The dramatic wattage of Mikhaël Hers’s film about a family upended by divorce might be low, but its positive attitude and teen antics have unshowy charm
Mikhaël Hers has made a likably unassuming and easygoing movie set in 1980s Paris; a world of LPs and stonewashed denim, with TV news archive footage interspersed in the drama. We start with the celebrations that marked Mitterrand’s presidential victory in 1981 and end towards the end of the decade with the younger characters preparing to cast their first vote.
This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it. The director appears to be aiming at the unshowy drama of Éric Rohmer. Three of his teen characters are shown sneaking into a cinema via the exit doors without paying, intending to see Joe Dante’s Gremlins but instead blundering into a screen showing Rohmer’s Full
moon in
Paris and being unexpectedly entranced by it. Later they are shocked to hear about its star, Pascale Ogier, dying at the age of 25.