Noëmie Lvovsky

In the last few years, no film has touched my heart like Noëmie Lvovsky’s Petites. And now I can remember no other film I could claim to have fallen in love with. Fallen in love with in the way a person falls in love. Probably exactly the same way you fall in love for the first time, at the age of thirteen, let’s say: as Noëmie Lvovsky’s girls fall in love with their individual and shared worlds, their first feelings of freedom, their first feelings of loneliness...their first boyfriends, too. Their world, the child of demonic imagination and romantic tempestuousness, is pervaded with the need to belong and a young person’s feeling of invincibility, defiance, a vague idea of absolute freedom into which flow deadly fears of expectancy and a waiting for wishes, obsessions and love to be fulfilled, a waiting for the end and the beginning of a new day. Noëmie Lvovsky follows the first (and it seems each time, last) pulses of youth in a highly perceptible, hundred percent effective syncopating rhythm of vignettes, wild, passionate and crazy, shoving each other away and colliding with each other, underlined with musical incisions. Like a merciless objective lens, they bring a premonition and measure time until the moment when they lie in the grass and, for a while, stop time in the form of a lucky star, which is a pure image of girlhood, infinite and eternal, and simultaneously a painful memory, like an old family photo from a time when the last shuddering premonition that all would once end and nothing would stay the same had come true.
La vie ne me fait pas peur is therefore a good title for the sequel to the story of the four girls, which is set three years later. A forty-minute prologue repeats Petites in half the original running time in specially edited episodes from the previous film; the remaining two thirds continue the story of the girls three years later, deep into adolescence, when their paths begin to separate. Even though it may be reasonable to ask whether a sequel was needed, and whether a banal account of their separation does not work against ‘Girls’ and all that which was written in its last image was clearly meant to be unfinished, I understand the need to continue as a sort of courage, a need to complete, to give concrete form to the paths which begin to separate, to construct separate characters and fates, and images of growing up. It is true that the director did not manage to visually structure this different modus of life with the same precision, or capture a suitable rhythm, but the narration is still gripping, and manages to pursue two of the most important strands in the story: the girls’ painful desire to stay in their common world and lock themselves within it and their early youth for ever, and the inertia of life, dragging each girl her separate way.
This year, La vie ne me fait pas peur won Noëmie Lvovsky the Jean Vigo national prize and the Silver Leopard for best ‘young film’ at the Locarno festival. Although not very long, her film career is paved with prizes for outstanding talent. Her first short, Dis-moi oui, dis-moi non (1989) received a lot of attention and a number of international awards; she confirmed early expectations with her first feature, Oublie-moi (1993), in which she masterfully directed Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in the role of an insane woman, madly in love with a man who no longer loves her. Here already can be seen Lvovsky’s fondness for characters and situations on the edge of the breath of life, abandoning themselves to extreme sentiments. During the pause which followed she collaborated with important contemporary French film makers (Desplechin, Garrel) as a screenplay writer among other things. In 1997 she made a television film, Petites (for Arte). The film was such a success that a number of renowned festivals requested it (unexpectedly) in theatrical release form.
Vlado Škafar

Sobota, 16. oktobra 20.00
Petites
Directed by: Noëmie Lvovsky; written by: Florence Seyvos, Noëmie Lvovsky; director of photography: Agnes Godard, Bertrand Chatry; cast: Magalie Woch (Emilie), Ingrid Molinier (Ines), Julie-Marie Parmentier (Stella), Camille Rousselet (Marion), Jean Luc Bideau, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
Francija, 1997, 35mm, col., 88 min. (French spoken, no subtitles)

Oublie-moi
Directed by: Noëmie Lvovsky; written by: Noëmie Lvovsky, Marc Čolodenko; director of photography: Agnes Godard, Bertrand Chatry; igrajo/ cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Nathalie), Emmanuelle Devos (Christelle), Laurent Grévill (Eric),  Olivier Pinalie (Denis), Emmanuel Salinger (Antoine), Philippe Torreton (Fabrice); music: Andrew Dickson.Francija, 1993, 35mm, col., 95 min., (French spoken, English subtitles)

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director Noëmie Lvovsky and scriptwriter Florence Seyvos.

In collaboration with Slovenska kinoteka
With the support of the Institut Français Charles Nodier