Catherine Corsini’s La belle saison’s triumph is due to the actresses’ performances
POINTS: 7
It’s 1971, in France. Delphine (Izia Higelin) is a young farm girl living in the south of the country with her parents. She helps her father (Jean-Henri Compère) in the many chores of the farm. In secrecy, Delphine has been seeing a girl her age, but the relationship won’t last long since her girlfriend is about to marry a man she barely knows — needless to say, because of parental and social mandates.
Tired of putting up with a double life, Delphine decides to leave her town and move to Paris. She gets a job and a place to live, and eventually meets Carole (Cécile de France), an older girl and an active feminist militant whom she soon falls for. But she won’t reveal her feelings to her yet, first she has to find the right moment. In the meantime, she starts attending feminist meetings and a whole new world opens up to her.
In due time — when and how won’t be disclosed here — a love story between Delphine and Carole begins to blossom. Bliss wasn’t that hard to find, after all. That is until a most unfortunate emergency takes place at Delphine’s farm. Now things are about to change, and not for the better.
Winner of the Variety Piazza Grande Award at the Locarno Film Festival, La belle saison, the new film by Catherine Corsini has the social and political feminist movements of the early 1970’s as a backdrop to focus on the tender and passionate love affair with an appropriate melodramatic edge — the filmmaker had already successfully tackled melodrama in Partir (2009), which unlike many of her films, was commercially released locally. This time, she goes for a more linear story than the ones this genre usually features, but with its intensity.
And it’s a wise decision to depict the fundamental issues of those times by following the girls’ story instead of by making what you could call a militant, strictly political film — which would’ve been easier and prosaic. Hence Corsini explores a lesbian romance with a lively, unrepentant spirit that goes hand in hand with love scenes where French kisses acquire a whole new meaning.
While watching La belle saison, I was reminded of Milos Forman’s Hair (1979), mostly because both films have a free-spirited air of impertinence, as well as a few common issues in their ideological agenda. Certainly, Corsini’s film is never a musical, yet it boasts a handful of scenes where music plays a narrative role in expressing the couple’s emotions in a very contagious manner.
Much of the film’s triumph is due to the actresses’ performances, which render complex, nuanced characters out of otherwise simple girls with no particular distinctive traits. Credit is also due to Noémie Lvovsky, who plays Delphine’s mother with an admirable emotional range, as she is both a victim of moral and social prejudice and a mother who loves her daughter dearly. In fact, if I had to single out the biggest achievement in La belle saison, I’d say that’s its feeling of complete genuineness.
production notes
Tiempo de revelaciones / Summertime/ La belle saison (France, 2015) Directed by Catherine Corsini. Written by Catherine Corsini, Laurette Polmanss. With Cécile de France, Izïa Higelin, Noémie Lvovsky, Kévin Azaïs, Laetitia Dosch, Benjamin Bellecour, Eloïse Genet, Patrice Tepasso. Music: Grégoire Hetzel. Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie. Produced by haz Producciones / France 3 Cinéma / Artémis Productions / Canal + / Naranja Cine Series / France Télévisions. Running time: 105 minutes.
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