Noemie Merlant, best known beyond France for her performances in Celine Sciamma’s and Todd Field’s made her debut as a writer-director-actor a few years back with , which starts with a bachelorette party. Merlant offers up another female-solidarity story in the shape of ( ), a comedy with a very dark streak or a giggly drama depending on how you look at it. Given at one point that a writer character in the film rejects the supposed rules of storytelling, which require clear acts and so forth, Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool.
It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold experiment than a hot mess. Then again, most of the female characters in the film might describe themselves at one point or another as hot messes, especially when misfortunes send them reeling. Operating off a script credited first to Merlant but also “in collaboration with” Sciamma, Merlant crafts a work that sometimes feels quite thought-out, even didactic as it shows women coping with sexual violence.
But elsewhere, whole scenes feel totally improvised and random, creating tonal movements that don’t so much shift as lurch, as if tossed by storms at sea. For example, the film opens with a taut mini-drama that observes abused wife Denise (Nadege Beausson-Diagne) finally snap and silence her vile husband for good. But Denise’s story is effectively just thrown aside as the focus moves on to De.
