Louise... l'insoumise

The feisty, sullen ten-year old heroine of this often cold and cheerless coming-of-age import is, as the title suggests, a kindred spirit to Antoine Doinel in 'The 400 Blows', but any resemblance to Francois Truffaut's film ends there. Besides being uncomfortably adrift between adolescence and maturity, Louise also has the disadvantage of being a Tunisian Jew living in metropolitan Paris, an intriguing cultural blend opening conflicts not even touched in Charlotte Silveira's single-minded screenplay. The writer director is clearly working from first-hand experience: the exchanges between Louise and her younger sister are priceless, but the story is probably more bleak than it needed to be, pitting the young protagonist against her shrill, domineering mother, an underwritten character who could have used a little more depth.

Frankly, I don't even know why I watched this movie, let alone taped it -- probably solely because the title has a certain charming ring to it. Ordinarily I'd rank the pleasures to be had out of watching a French film which you could paraphrase as "sensitive portrayal of the travails of an unruly young girl growing up in an uprooted Jewish family in the Parisian banlieue in the Sixties" considerably below those of receiving unnarcotised root canal treatment by a demented Bulgarian sodomist at the bottom of a freezing cold cesspool on the outer reaches of the seventh circle of hell on a rainy Monday morning. However "Louise, l'insoumise" is simply fantastic. Marvellously directed, exceptionally acted (especially by the lead actress, who, sadly, never starred in another movie), brilliantly written, superbly filmed. And it all seems so effortless as to make you wonder how other movies manage to be so god-damn awful. Really, my English is insufficient to tell you how truly magnificent this movie is -- lesser movies compare to it like stale diet Coke to fine wine. Everyone should watch it, and especially those who don't normally go for movies of this genre -- it opens your eyes for the potential of cinema.