Jeune Femme

We first meet Paula with a giant ban­dage on her fore­head, cov­er­ing the wound where she head­butted her ex-boyfriend’s door. She has just been turfed out of his Parisian flat, where he works as a well-known pho­tog­ra­ph­er and she, pre­sum­ably, pads around like a spoiled house­pet. Léonor Serraille’s debut fea­ture film gen­tly probes female iden­ti­ty and the smoth­er­ing influ­ence of the ​‘genius’ man, and it does so with all but the slight­est impo­si­tion from the man him­self. Paula, instead, is the sole focus of Jeune Femme.

Laeti­tia Dosch stars as the lost thir­tysome­thing who has to regain her sense of self after serv­ing as an artist’s muse for a decade, and her per­for­mance is mag­net­ic. Words tum­ble from her mouth at speed, her red hair flies in her face, and she’s a con­stant whirling dervish of ener­getic feel­ing, but the truth is Paula doesn’t have a very deep sense of self. Post-breakup, she is broke, home­less, and direc­tion­less after being uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly replaced by a younger girl. She rubs peo­ple the wrong way, she’s unqual­i­fied for most jobs, and even her moth­er is estranged from her.

As the film pro­gress­es, Ser­raille fol­lows Paula as she search­es for work and attempts to fig­ure out her place in the world on her own terms. Along the way, she steals her ex’s fluffy white cat, befriends a girl through a bizarre mis­un­der­stand­ing, becomes a lov­ing but irre­spon­si­ble au pair, and attempts to patch up her rela­tion­ship with her mother.

With the man­ic ener­gy of its lead per­for­mance left to speak for itself, Serraille’s style is one of con­fi­dent real­ism. There are run-down hotels, lone­ly pub­lic parks, unfriend­ly rain-soaked streets: Paris here is an ugly, over­whelm­ing metrop­o­lis, with no residue of its old roman­tic rep­u­ta­tion but for in the praise giv­en it by Ous­mane, a secu­ri­ty guard who befriends Paula. He’s an immi­grant, and from his outsider’s eye, he sees the city’s appeal. To Paula, who once was graced with its artis­tic and finan­cial lime­light, it’s less attrac­tive. Leonor Ser­raille direct­ed Jeune Femme while preg­nant, and when sim­i­lar top­ics arise in Jeune Femme, Paula’s strange­ly inti­mate con­ver­sa­tion with a female doc­tor feels strik­ing­ly genuine.

Yet Jeune Femme is also drol­ly fun­ny, as when Paula joins a tyran­ni­cal­ly fem­i­nine retail team in a shop­ping mall lin­gerie bar. Slight­ly unhinged though she may be, there’s a warmth and deter­mi­na­tion in Paula that’s impos­si­ble not to like. She’s a grown woman in a state of arrest­ed devel­op­ment, but she loves fierce­ly and learns inde­pen­dence in a piece­meal, occa­sion­al­ly painful way. Serraille’s film is one of the most sat­is­fy­ing and gen­tly fem­i­nist char­ac­ter stud­ies of recent times, using as its guid­ing force the sheer force of per­son­al­i­ty of its lead­ing actress.