À tout de suite (2004)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

Director Benoît Jacquot takes us back in time to the glorious years of the French New Wave with his latest, and possibly greatest, film: À tout de suite.  With its grainy black and white photography, sparse dialogue, long static takes and general impression of self-conscious artistic over-indulgence, the film immediately calls to mind the classic mould-fracturing films of such great Nouvelle Vague directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache.  On the face of it, this looks like just another director going retro for the sake of it, but that really isn't the case in this instance.  The style which Jacquot borrows for the film is entirely appropriate for its subject and it's hard to imagine how it could have been made in any other way and still retain its impact.

In essence, À tout de suite is a plausible mélange of road movie and coming-of-age drama, in which a cosseted and very naïve adolescent girl is brutally yanked out of her cosy middle class milieu and thrown into a sordid and brutal landscape of gangsters, predatory older men, poverty and isolation.  The loose narrative and somewhat ill-defined characterisation would be frustrating in a conventional film but here these work well to put the focus entirely on the central character, played with an extraordinary intensity and sense of realism by the magnificent Isild Le Besco.

It's an uncomfortable, almost visceral kind of film which cuts deeply into the viewer's consciousness.   Jacquot is far less concerned with narrative coherence than with getting across how his heroine feels and reacts as her life is turned upside down.  The stark cinematographic style - reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1963) - works perfectly to draw us into Lili's private world and get us to experience, as fully as cinema permits, her excruciating turmoil as all her childhood certainties are swept away to leave an adult who is forever scarred by wounds that will never heal.  It's potent and it's poetic - a truly haunting piece of cinema.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1975.  Lili, a 19-year old arts student, comes from a privileged family and her life so far has been without incident.  All that is to change when she meets and falls in love with a handsome young man of North African origin.  One evening, her lover calls her and tells her he is caught up in a bank robbery.  One of his friends has already been shot dead by the police and he is preparing his escape with the stolen booty and a handful of hostages.   Scarcely able to comprehend what is happening, Lili joins her boyfriend and agrees to go on the run with him...