Godrèche Debuts 'A Girl's Life' Starring Daughter
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- Judith Godrèche debuts 'A Girl's Life,' her second feature, as an adaptation of Annie Ernaux's novel of the same title, bookended by Valérie Dréville's septuagenarian Ernaux-style voiceover
- Tess Barthélemy, Godrèche's daughter, stars as 17-year-old Annie at a 1958 summer camp where Victor Bonnel's Brando-esque 'H' targets the new girl in a wordless, blunt sexual initiation sequence
- The film draws obvious parallels to Godrèche's teenage breakthrough in Jacques Doillon's 1990 'The Disenchanted'; she has accused Doillon and Bênoit Jacquot of sexual abuse and stands as a leading figure in France's #MeToo
- Joachim Philippe's cinematography uses POV close-ups — including a recurring dangling lightbulb shot from beneath H's body — to capture the deceptive romance turning 'nefarious'
- 'A Girl's Life' joins a cluster of Ernaux adaptations including Audrey Diwan's 'Happening' (2021 Venice Golden Lion winner) and Danielle Arbid's 'Simple Passion' (2020), with the reviewer calling it Ernaux's 'most auspicious adaptation' alongside Diwan's
- Reviewer praises Godrèche's 'layered, empathetic' script on masochistic heterosexual dynamics but flags a 'corny, self-aggrandizing coda' and underdeveloped supporting roles for Guslagie Malanda (nurse) and Maïwène Barthélémy (a lesbian-coded redhead)
Why it matters: Godrèche — who has accused two prominent French directors of sexual abuse — now translates Ernaux's universalized vision of normalized violence into a film that doubles as personal reckoning. Unlike Diwan's 'Happening,' Godrèche's entry operates in an explicitly autobiographical register, raising the artistic and political stakes of the Ernaux adaptation canon.
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