Sunday 25 September 2011

Bonne Vacances


This is a seaside-destination holiday film that has a beautifully judged scent of torpor, emptiness, drift, dog-day, and inconsequentiality.

A believable teenage girl (why do French actresses effortlessly do Teenage, while their Brit equivalents are struggling to be any more convincing than Byker Grove) visits a tatty seaside town with her paralysingly beach-ready and hopelessly self-regarding cousin, on the rebound from a brief failed marriage. Men notice them. There is flirting and posturing from the adults, already far too attached to their dramas.

The most wonderful element to this is the disregarded, unhip, virtually deserted town all the heaving sexual gamesmanship (and gameswomanship) plays itself out against. There's literally no audience worth the mention for the adults' arch, bored manipulation of eachother. Beautifully judged stuff.


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