Jeune Femme review: Restless energy helps Leonor Serraille’s debut soar

Dir: Leonor Serraille, 98 mins (15), starring: Laetitia Dosch, Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Gregoire Monsaingeon, Jean-Christophe Folly, Nathalie Richard, Arnaud de Cazes

No setback keeps Paula down for too long. Dosch plays her with a manic, improvisatory energy

Writer-director Leonor Serraille’s debut feature follows a very troubled young woman, Paula (Laetitia Dosch), as she ricochets around Paris in the wake of a breakup. Our very first sight of her is when she bangs her head against the door of the ex-boyfriend’s apartment, shrieking at him to open it. He won’t let her in, even if she does have his cat.

Paula is needy and frequently obnoxious. Everybody close to her shuns her. Her mother wants nothing to do with her. “I realised you were a pain, Paula. I just didn’t realise how much of a pain,” a friend whose couch she wants to sleep on barks at her.

In the course of the film, Paula grows on us as she tries, and invariably fails, to make new connections. “Stability is boring” is her mantra as her life becomes ever more chaotic. She goes for job interviews. She searches for places to stay.

Jeune Femme was shot on location in Paris, on crowded subways or on the streets or in cramped apartments. It has a restless energy which reflects the temperament of its troubled heroine. She befriends a female stranger who mistakes her for an old school friend. She strikes up a rapport with Ousmane (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), a well-dressed security guard who seems to understand her better than she does herself. She eventually manages to get work as a babysitter for a wealthy woman who inexplicably trusts her and fails to check her references. Her unorthodox approach to childcare involves clowning around with the woman’s daughter, feeding her Nutella and frozen food and taking her on swimming trips, but scrupulously avoiding such matters as homework or tidying. She also gets a job in a department store, in a “knicker bar”.

No setback keeps Paula down for too long. Dosch plays her with a manic, improvisatory energy. If she has a cut on her head where she banged it against the boyfriend’s door, she will simply wrap her very long hair around her head so no one can see the bleeding.

Jeune Femme continually surprises us. At times, it is very dark but then the film will take on the guise of a screwball comedy. Its double-edged quality is reflected in its heroine’s appearance. She has heterochromia, which is to say her eyes are different colours. Depending on the vantage point, the same events here can viewed as either farcical or tragic. Whatever the case, the energy levels here never flag.