La fille seule

Early one morning Valerie has to tell her unemployed boyfriend Remi that she is pregnant. She has decided to keep the child, but they argue whether they should break up or not. That same morning Valerie starts working in room service at a smart hotel. The film follows the routine of Valerie bringing breakfast to the guests, Valerie constantly trying to phone her mother, and Valerie's relations with the other staff.

This was the breakthrough role for the 19-year-old Virginie Ledoyen, best known in America for the Danny Boyle film "The Beach", and earned her a César Award nomination. It was well-deserved. This is a great film, with no real plot or structure... just a look at love and the life of a girl in real time. And, you know what? Ledoyen is the selling point. Anyone else in the role and who knows what would have happened? I will have to be on the lookout for her in other films, because she clearly has that spark...

Like HIGH NOON, this film is largely set in real time, as it follows a day in the life of the young woman of the condescending title. Unlike the classic Western, there is no action melodrama, no compression of crises or events, no heroes or villains, no tension. This is not to say it's not an unusual day - the heroine informs her boyfriend of their accidental pregnancy, begins a new job and decides to change her life.

The film starts in a cafe, as Valerie tells her unemployed boyfriend Remi that she is pregnant. He is a selfish, shiftless idler, and his reaction is predictably self-centred. She goes to the hotel where she is starting work, attracting jealous hostility from one fellow waitress, lecherous advances from a waiter, and fending off friendly gestures from another colleague.

During the course of the morning, she serves an irritable Italian couple, a pleasant French businessman alienated from his daughter, and a neurotic wife who demands eggs for breakfast, and is found making love to her husband when Valerie returns. Exasperated, Valerie returns to the cafe, and the ever-indolent Remi. After his cowardly intimations of abandoning responsibility, she storms out, nearly getting run over except for Remi's quick reflexes. The shock seems to force her into action.

There isn't a single scene that does not feature Virginie Ledoyen, an actress whose talent was leodimmed in THE BEACH, but is highly regarded in France. This emphasis might please some of the actress's male admirers, but the problem with real-time is that the boring (or 'phatic' as intellectuals like to call them) bits cut out of most films are left in, all in the name of realism. And so we follow Valerie endlessly, walking down the street, walking up stairs, walking down corridors, riding in lifts, generally being surly. Ledoyen is not required to show much emotion - who does in every day life? - and so this interminable realism risks becoming monotonous.

LA FILLE SEULE is, therefore, a melodrama in the 1950s Hollywood sense, following as it does a heroine of limited options in her hermetic environment, where her personality and possibilities are restricted to her surroundings. The more Valerie walks down the same corridor, the more we feel she is caught in a labyrinth, and there are times when the decor seems to overwhelm her, as she is caught in long shot as just another feature of the frame.

However, in the great Hollywood melodramas of Sirk et al, the monotony and repetition finally turned in on the film, and the repressions rose to crisis point, bursting the scene in physical and emotional trauma. Jacquot refuses to exploit his material's potential for melodrama - any life-changing decision is elided, the film is determinedly open-ended - so while his film is 'objectively' authentic, it doesn't feel true - this girl is so alone, she is separate even from us.

Valerie's lonely plight is contrasted with that of the other characters, as Jacquot creates a patchwork of alienation, as well as offering his heroine pessimistic insights into relationships, gender (Valerie is determined her child will be a boy, such are the options open to women) and parenthood. Crucial here is the scene where Valerie signs her contract. She left her last job when a cook tried it on, and her female employer, Sabine's snide interrogations accuse her of using her striking looks to attract clients for 'tips'. Valerie is outraged, but a phonecall for Sabine from her vacillating lover shows how vulnerable she really is, and that the title has more general implications (see also Valerie's mother).

Many critics have compared the film to those of the New Wave, presumably because of the open-air filming and young heroine. The opening sequence with the pinball machine and cafe, the day-in-the-life narrative, and Valerie's short hair at the end all echo Godard's VIVRE SA VIE, but the film bares little real relation to that pioneering French movement. There is none of the breezy freshness of the original films, none of their engaging untidiness, romantic verve, personal poetry or wide-eyed wonder at the medium, never mind the rigorous critique of a Godard film like VIVRE SA VIE.

Passers-by might smile into the camera, but its movements are deliberate and elegant, making the film's 'realism' seem very contrived. This wouldn't be a problem if the film had used artifice to recreate the heroine's inner life - instead all we have is a big modern hotel, a bit of talk, unyielding characters, and lots, oh lots, of corridors.

As John Lennon once wrote, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

This is a very simple film, and that simplicity gives it an extraordinary beauty. And speaking of "extraordinary beauty," Virginie Ledoyen is a revelation, a young Isabelle Adjani in the making.

Ledoyen plays Valerie, a young French girl who one morning meets her boyfriend in cafe, argues with him, then runs off to a hotel a couple blocks away to begin a new job. Her new co-workers greet her in the manner co-workers always greet a newcomer: some with welcome arms and others with contempt. When Valerie gets a break and runs back to the cafe to finish the argument with her boyfriend, we feel every tick of the clock. We know she is taking too long on the break and has got to get back!

But everything that happens to Valerie is so very real and so very urgent because the film is shot in real time. This was a daring attempt by the director, Benoit Jacquot, but his gamble hits the bullseye. Of course, with Virginie Ledoyen to follow around with his camera, Jacquot could hardly go wrong.

A Single Girl (La Fille Seule) is one of those rare, pleasant films. Beautiful, young, Virginie Ledoyen is followed with a video cam as she argues with her boyfriend then takes a job as a chambermaid dealing with various personalities and rebuffing passes from her boss. Virginie was made for the close-ups; one never gets bored watching her walk down the corridors of a large hotel. And this beauty seems unaffected by it all; she is another pea in the Parisian pod. Director Benoit Jacquot has an eye for beauty and for film; this is a must see.

I picked up "La Fille seule" ("A Single Girl"; French, 1995, with English subtitles) on video tonight and just finished watching it with a friend of mine. Neither of us really understood what the film was about or what its message was.

Nominally, the film shows a morning in the life of Valérie (Virginie Ledoyen), a woman probably in her early 20s, and her having to tell her unemployed and uninspiring boyfriend, Rémi (Benoît Magimel), that she is pregnant. It is also the first day of work for her, after being unemployed for a year or so. Much of the elapsed time depicted in the film is on the job - she works delivering room service meals to guests at a fancy hotel in Paris. The story is revealed in real time - when Valérie walks, we follow her until she gets where she is going, and then continue our almost voyeuristic tailgating of her. The shooting gives an impression of hand-held filming.

I enjoyed the concept of showing life as it is with time neither compressed nor played backwards or forwards. We see all of Valérie's morning - her walks down long corridors and rides up and down the hotel elevators delivering food, her signing of her employment contract, her washing her hands in a bathroom - everything. However, this becomes a bit monotonous - which could have been the director's goal - and I found myself imagining scene transitions and cuts to integrate the story's meaningful montages and leave out irrelevant trivia.

I didn't really understand what message we're supposed to glean. Valérie is surprisingly bereft of much emotion in most of the film; is "A Single Girl" a simple tale of the possibly mindless dehumanization some work can inflict on us? A depiction of monotony of real life? I don't think so. Maybe just an experimental play with time? That could be, but it could have been much more clever and interesting.