TRUE LOVE

A word from the selection committee :

True Love opens on a memory, an image we won’t be able to shake off : in the familiar space of a flat, a young boy with an angelic face appears in a doorway. He smiles, and at the bottom of his spotless white pajamas, we see a bloodstain between his legs. A teenage girl’s voice narrates and a male voice interrupts: “It would end like this?” A reporter, unseen, follows the teenage girl (played with impressive ruthfulness by Patience Munchenbach) through her everyday life: her building, her friends, comic books, older gentlemen, Astérix and Obélix, her brother, her discovery of porn sites, Largo Winch, the family flat, the inexplicable panic attacks, the teachers, the therapy sessions. The mother is silent, the brother seems perplexed, and the teenage girls recount their experiences, impassively, in a world where pornographic images stand in for sexual education and the surrounding pedocriminal behaviours seem to be the normal order of things. And life goes on. The film leaves us stunned: we see, we understand, we suspect, yet something stops us from drawing the implications of what is unfolding before our eyes. And the image haunts us still, right into the psychiatrist’s office, where testimony also seems to be denied as soon as it is given. Since Home Tour (her previous film), Laura Dauvin has been inventing and shaping a unique form, in which the unspeakable is not a secret to be revealed but something impossible to face, even when laid bare.

Rose Hirgorom 

Traduction : Aurore Kahan