Até Já

This film is showing on Sundance Channel currently, in it's Festival Version (i.e. with the Pink Floyd music). I can't imagine them using Tangerine Dream instead of the Floyd...

The film is murky in it's storytelling. The plot, if you call it one, is not particularly new, but it bears paying attention to. For the life of me, and I was following quite closely, I couldn't figure out the main character's NAMES! I'm not sure they were even mentioned! The lead actress is incredibly attractive, if pouty throughout the entire piece. The other actresses have that same sensibility, if they aren't featured very much. I suppose the boys are good looking as well.

It's a beautifully framed film, the mese en scene is particularly noteworthy, however, it's 96 minute run time is at least 10 minutes too long, and the lack of a cohesive narrative will put most off.

Additionally, the white subtitles are very difficult to read in spots. I can't understand why someone would put white subtitles on a black and white film. Yellow would have been a much better choice.

Enjoyed this movie. As one reviewer said: it shows what it was like to be 19 again. I liked the way the story was developed but wish there was a sequel. It somehow touched me deeply, especially the way it dealt with sexuality. The way the story ended was interesting - but frustrating. I would like to see more movies by this director. The scenery shots were nice. I wish the movie could have been a little longer, so as to develop more of the story. I saw the movie several times, just in case I would never be able to see it again ever. The fact that it is based on a book, a memoir makes it all the more fascinating. I was interested in hearing that the female star was of mixed heritage. I would like to read the book from which this story was taken but it does not seem to be available in the US - translated or not.

Benoit Jacquot takes a real story from the 70s to base his film. "A tout de suite" photographed in black and white by Caroline Campeter, tries to capitalize on the mood and atmosphere of better made French movies of an earlier period.

The young woman, Lili, at the center of the film, is a woman from a bourgeois home. Evidently, although nothing is made clear, her parents are divorced, or at least are separated. The big apartment where she lives with her father and sister seems to be the refuge for stray characters this girl feels attracted to.

First, when we first encounter her, she is in bed with another young woman, who is a fellow student in her drawing class. There is a hint of lesbianism, although nothing is clear. Lili and the friend later meet a shady character who invites them to go dancing. In the boite, Lili meets Bada, a Moroccan, who she feels immediately attracted to. This chance meeting will prove to be Lili's downfall as she embarks in a partnership with a couple of bank robbers trying to escape justice in France.

The film's best asset is Isild Le Besco, who as Lili makes the best of the central role. Ms. Le Besco is a beautiful woman who one sees in all her splendor. This is an actress who has no problems being naked in front of the camera that clearly adores her. Her character is a complex one. The other players, none of whom we are acquainted with, do their jobs well.

Mr. Jacquot film has a feel of being a documentary in the way the action is presented. "A tout de suite" is only notable for the character study of Lili, but we don't feel involvement with the rest of the people we meet. It's a disturbing film that, judging from the empty theater where we saw it, doesn't seem to have caught the imagination of the public.

The film is based on Élisabeth Fanger's autobiographical story, J'Avais Dix Huit Ans of (translated as either "I was 18" or possibly "When I was 18"). She was 18 and in her last year of high school when she fell in love with Sid Mohamed Badaoui, a bank robber. She was still 18 a few months later when she fled with her lover and started her 2 years as a fugitive in Spain, Morocco and Greece.

Along with Garrel's more notable effort, Les Amants Réguliers, these two French filmmakers (both over 60 years old) might be trying to re-live their youth and make a film they could have made 30 or 40 years before. They aspire to create cinema like the best of the French filmmakers a few years their senior, but fail to note that these successful French film makers from the 60's and 70's made deeply personal films. It's not the pacing of the efforts that is at fault, but a lack of anything concrete to say. Just a long dose of ennui with a little existential nausea thrown in for good measure.

A Tout de Suite is one of those little-seen and little-known French films that play for a couple of weeks at the Angelika theater in New York City- and subsequently get a playing once or twice on the Sundance channel- and it stays fairly in obscurity for the rest of cinema's days. I saw it first in the theater on a whim, and I was pleasantly (if that's the word to use) surprised on how effective the minimalistic style used by Benoît Jacquot helped suppress the probable insufferable melodrama.

It tells the story of Lili (Le Besco), who is 19 and is surrounded by a kind of teenage wasteland, though mostly through her relationship with a man who is a thief. He gets in a botched bank robbery and has to hide away, and she does so with him...all the way out of France and into a Muslim country (or what seems like it, maybe it was Morocco). It's not anything that leads to any big point about adolescent angst or disillusionment or even about bourgeois discontent, but it's a fascinating film for what Jacquot decides to show with small scenes, of moments so contemplative just based around how he and his DP shoot the actors (mostly in close-ups), and how time feels not totally joined together in a weird way. And while IMDb says different, as I remembered seeing it the Pink Floyd song Shine on You Crazy Diamond was used to fantastic effect, in a similarly subdued manner.

Nothing is very highly charged with emotions, and if they are it's only in small, sudden bursts; everything is so under the surface it's as if everything will come out at the seams as Lili wanders in a daze around a foreign country- a true Lost in Translation scenario, all based on a faux- love situation.

Bottom line, if you want to watch some good- and yes, pretentious- film-making, this is one to keep an eye on for a real late-night screening on IFC or Sundance or whatever, and see if it's worth the couple of hours. I was very glad I took a chance back in 2005 in that near empty theater, even if I haven't seen the film since, as it has that authentic, independent feeling that leaves one oddly satisfied.