The title could have been My little loves. But Carly Blackman opted for My sacred youth, film made with energy, self-production and autofiction adapted from a short story of which the director is also the author. In black and white, this film with raised hand, “miniature”, as we list the noble impulses outside the formatted circuits of CNC financing, poses the dilemma of the necessary indulgence in principle when faced with an object that displeases (and even irritates).
This is the crazy story, in the style of an old New Wave fantasy, of the sentimentally disappointing days of Jane, the heroine, an Anglo-French student in Paris in pale and distant memory of Rohmer’s Nadja. It is 2016, the film was shot that year, demonstrating a romanticism of pre-#MeToo firepower (we even hear “Are you teasing me? Bitch!” in the mouth of an ousted little guy) which ultimately changes us little from the post-#MeToo lamentations of Caroline Fourest and his ilk – a world stuck in the last century, to (change) nothing. The means at hand give the idea of shooting on the sly where one can: metro, streets, churches, Laundromat, why not.
Only this world of young and pretty heterosexuals, white, hair in the wind or in the eyes, is only reference to the sixties and seventies, cinephilia and quotes. There is no more life here than what cinema plagiarizes from cinema. “Imitated” cinema to be placed not far from the “filmed cinema” hated by Jean-Claude Biette. Alas, this damn truth about My sacred youth is that the film finds itself crushed by its fetishism, the sacrosanct cinema. “It’s the heart that counts, not the brain,” is written on a vacuum-packed bag of lettuce that Jane, who must have read, is looking at. Salads of Love written by Antoine Doinel.
My sacred youth by Carly Blackman with Justine Rousseau, Antoine Jobard… 1h30.
Source: www.liberation.fr
