Films portraying teenagers’ early romantic and sexual experiences have become something approaching a staple of French cinema in recent decades, from Catherine Breillat’s shocking A Ma Soeur!, to Abdellatif Kechiche’s moving Blue Is the Warmest Color, to François Ozon’s captivating Summer of 85. What these movies have in common, though, is that they have been made by middle-aged people about teenagers. Spring Blossom offers one major difference to these films insofar as it was made by someone barely out of their teens. It is 20-year-old Suzanne Lindon (daughter of French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain)’s debut as writer, director and actor, and she does an impressive job of all three things. It’s a deeply flawed piece of work, but one that provides a unique and provocative take on well-worn subject matter.
The film’s protagonist is Suzanne (Lindon), a middle-class 16-year-old girl who lives with her family in a vaguely bohemian apartment in inner Paris. Her unsatisfying life involves going to school, having dinner with her parents and sister (whose company she seems to enjoy and find stimulating) and going out to parties with her schoolfriends (whom she generally finds boring, unedifying and sexually uninteresting). One day, on her way to school, she walks past a theater outside of which stands Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), a handsome but immature and apathetic 35-year-old actor enjoying a cigarette break from a play he is rehearsing.
She is immediately attracted to him, and as the two get to know each other following another cigarette break during which Suzanne introduces herself to Raphaël, he becomes attracted to her. What they have in common is they are both bored by the company of people their own age; he is young for his years and she is old for hers. As one might predict, an illicit and inappropriate relationship ensues in which Raphaël grooms Suzanne with presents of candy, developing a feeling of growing intimacy between the two of them by making her feel like she’s playing some sort of muse/manic pixie dream girl-type role in his life.
Films of this nature are frequently problematic. The way in which Spring Blossom portrays its central coupling is decidedly non-judgmental and at times borderline amoral. However, it feels less disconcerting for a director like Lindon to be trafficking in these sorts of depictions than it would a male director of Raphaël’s age, as she has recent lived experience of what being a 16-year-old girl is like. As such, she is asking the audience to empathize with Suzanne in her falling for a (semi-) charismatic older man, rather than with Raphaël’s exploitation of a young girl’s affections for him. Indeed, the story is an extrapolation of sorts, as Lindon apparently wrote the screenplay when she was a year younger than her protagonist. That being said, there is a particularly skin-crawling scene in which Suzanne asks her father (Frédéric Pierrot) about the sorts of clothes in which he thinks women look sexy. In the next scene, she dresses in the sorts of clothes he mentions in his reply in order to attract Raphaël’s attention, with cinematographer Jérémie Attard’s camera lingering over her bare legs.
One of Spring Blossom’s biggest flaws is its abrupt ending. It comes to a stop rather than a conclusion, and as a result it feels like Lindon wants to avoid showing her audience the emotional fallout and real-world consequences of the deeply troubling affair she’s depicted in a relatively amoral fashion. At 74 minutes, she effectively makes her first feature’s storytelling concise and lean, but arguably, the film could have benefited from more screen time in order to show what happens to its characters as a result of their actions and what they learn from them. The film being a previously unknown actor’s directorial debut, this is possibly attributable to budgetary constraints.
Ultimately, Spring Blossom is an enjoyable but flawed coming-of-age tale that many people will find troubling. It should appeal to fans of films like Blue Is the Warmest Color and Summer of 85, as well as Ozon’s earlier, more provocative Jeune et Jolie. Lindon, Valois et al turn in solid performances, and the apparent boredom and awkwardness of Parisian teenage house parties is vividly portrayed. Aficionados of the city in which it’s set should enjoy the street scenes, and Attard’s atmospheric, shallow-focus shooting of them recalls Stéphane Fontaine’s work on Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. It is, broadly speaking, an impressive and compelling piece of work that bodes well for its writer-director-star’s future efforts.
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