Seventeen-year-old Milla and her young boyfriend Leo run away to France’s English Channel coast. There, they play at being adults in an abandoned home, creating an independent reality for themselves as they negotiate the complicated transition from adolescence to maturity. A second part follows with each now forced to confront adulthood prematurely: Leo with a job on a fishing boat, and Milla as a young mother and hotel cleaner. One of the finest French films of the past year, Valérie Massadian’s second feature gracefully blends a naturalistic approach with narrative ellipses and explosions of pure artifice. All of this combines in one of the most sensitive and wise depictions of adolescent experience and young motherhood in ages, one that in Massadian’s skilled hands is completely devoid of sentimentality.
