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A mood of heightened melodrama gives way to something strangely enchanting in Petite Solange, the story of a 13-year-old girl coming to terms with the shattering notion that her parents’ love (and for that matter anyone’s) might not last. The director is Axelle Ropert, a French critic, actor, writer, and filmmaker whose career has pivoted between the genre films she and her partner, Serge Bozon, have collaborated on and her own body of work behind the camera. That personal side to her oeuvre has always tended more toward the familial and the bittersweet, just as it has proven Ropert a keen proponent of the Tolstoyan idea that happy families are only intriguing when torn apart.

Petite Solange centers around the unlikely named Maserati clan: a happy family and one ripe for the tearing. Newcomer Jade Springer gives an excellent performance as the eponymous teen, a young woman who finds...

“I was very struck by a quote by Fritz Lang, who said that ‘every film should criticize something,’ ” Axelle Ropert says. For the French filmmaker’s latest work “Petite Solange,” a world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, it is the complicated aspects of familial life and interpersonal relationships that come under the microscope.

Ropert’s film follows young Solange as she witnesses the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and loses her sense of self in the process. Alone and neglected, her childlike spirit is broken by the realities of a toxic adult world. “I’m very much a cinephile and I always think of my films as starting from other films from the history of cinema that I’ve loved,” Ropert explains. “But this time I really started with the subject matter of divorce as seen from the child’s point of view. It’s a very important subject...

French director Axelle Ropert makes an unwise shift from sprightly comedy to faux-naive artificiality with “Petite Solange,” a tiresome divorce drama seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl. Though clearly meant as a refreshing, femme-centric throwback to a style of filmmaking that petered out in the 1970s (Ropert cites inspiration from François Truffaut and Luigi Comencini), the results merely feel out of place, bizarrely innocent and clumsily executed. The fault lies in both concept and script, making it unlikely that “Solange” will be gracing many screens outside Francophone territories.

Danger signs are apparent right from the start when Benjamin Esdraffo’s inescapable saccharine music too quickly accompanies the action. The tunes are part and parcel of the film’s entire design, from the pale filtered visuals to the ’70s-influenced clothing — is that really a baked casserole the father serves up for dinner, and what on earth is going on...