'A Bright Girl', an adolescent portrait with a mixed outcome
New releases include Agathe Riedinger's debut and Andrea Di Stefano's 'Il maestro' with Pierfrancesco Favino
A short film turned into a debut feature film: this is the path taken by 'A Bright Girl', the debut feature by Agathe Riedinger, a French director who developed this project on the basis of her 2018 short film 'J'attends Jupiter'.
Of that 23-minute film, Riedinger retains the narrative structure, centred on Liane, a 19-year-old girl who lives with her mother and younger sister. Obsessed with the idea of becoming famous thanks to her physical appearance and followers on social networks, Liane has high hopes of changing her life when she is called to audition for a hit reality show.
Shot in several sequences with the hand-held camera, so that the young protagonist's turmoil can be felt even more closely, 'A Bright Girl' is a film about adolescence that connects to many reflections on today's world and the need for many young people to be flashy at all costs, to be seen and to feel alive in a world increasingly dominated by digital logic.
With just the right amount of emotional transport, Riedinger's direction strongly empathises with the main character, while not forgetting to offer interesting insights into the supporting figures (the cast also includes Alexis Manenti, who became famous with Ladj Ly's 'Les Miserables').
A film that tastes too much like it has already been seen
The main merit of this first film is its ability to involve, thanks also to a discrete editing rhythm, but at the same time there are obvious limits in a script that smacks too much of the familiar and in the treatment of ideas that others have handled with greater care and depth in recent years: suffice it to think, on the subject of influencers, of Radu Jude's splendid "Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World", seen in competition at the 2023 Locarno Festival.
