The resemblance between Judith Godreche and her daughter Tess Barthelemy, who also starred in her mother’s feature debut A Girl’s Life, is especially striking to those who know her from her breakthrough role as a teenager in the 1990 Jacques Doillon drama Dazzle. Watching a doe-eyed Barthelemy in this film, which is clearly an adaptation of Annie Ernault’s novel of the same name, it’s hard not to draw parallels between this bitter tale of sexual initiation and Godreche’s own life experiences, the sexual abuse accusations she made against Doillon (and director Benoît Jacquot), and her status as one of France’s most notable champions today. #MeToo movement.
But in keeping with Ernault’s far-reaching vision of a deeply intimate first-person narrative that is both collective and deliberately universal, The Life of a Girl succeeds not only as a haunting echo of Godreche’s early days, but also as a moving and sometimes disturbing meditation on the gender relations that normalize violence against women, especially the kind of violence that is difficult to recognize until long after the harm has occurred.
Narrated by a septuagenarian version of Ernaux’s novel, played by Valérie Dreville, the film primarily tells the story of Annie, a 17-year-old (Barthélémy) in the summer of 1958. A girlish girl with fishbowl glasses and a huge sweet tooth, Annie is a reclusive dreamer who longs to escape the strictures of small-town Catholic life and “find her people.” It happened during a few sunny months away from home during her first assignment as a camp counselor in training.
There, her enthusiasm is quickly met with hostility from other counselors. Mean girls in plaid skirts and lipstick, and even brutal boys who think in terms of their genitals. Their leader is a pudgy, Brando-like blonde named “H” (Victor Bonnell) who, predictably, sets his sights on the protagonist due to his repeated preference for “the new girl” every summer. Annie is excited, but she didn’t expect him to take off his clothes so quickly. It’s an uncomfortably candid, almost wordless sequence that leads the couple from a cave party to the twin beds in Annie’s shared dormitory. There’s nothing romantic about crossing first base for the first time, but Annie is oblivious to her own abuse, or at least convinced that it’s part of the process.
“A Girl’s Life” joins a recent body of work inspired by Ernaux. These include Daniel Arvid’s Simple Passion (2020), the critically acclaimed stage production of The Years, which premiered in 2022, and the home video documentary The Super 8 Years (2022), written by Ernault and directed by his son David Ernault-Briaud. But the Nobel laureate’s most auspicious film adaptation to date is arguably The Happening (2021), directed by 2021 Venice Golden Lion winner Audrey Dewan: A vérité depiction of a college student’s illegal abortion in 1960s France, this film takes place several years after the events of A Girl’s Tale in the timeline of Ernault’s life.
Barthelemy’s Annie may be younger than Annamaria Bartolomei’s The Happening protagonist Anne, but the length of time Godrèche’s film covers provides a powerful opportunity for the younger actress to show off her dramatic chops as well. What’s impressive is how she goes from the goofy (yet quick-witted) innocence of Taylor Dearden in The Pit to the wounded, paranoid character with the manic glow of a young Winona Ryder.
Cinematographer Joachim Philippe moves the camera close to Annie’s face, capturing the nightly drunken parties and carousing from her perspective. Slow motion and neon lights at dusk initially give these scenes a romantic edge, but then it turns deceptive and sinister. One recurring image emphasizes the traumatic ugliness of Aise’s presumably consensual relationship with Annie and H. The buzzing, dangling light bulb was shot from her perspective, looking up from beneath his body. Godreche’s screenplay, on the other hand, provides a provocative and nuanced depiction of Annie’s mental decline. She is a victim of groupthink and brainwashed into self-harm by the fantasies sold to young women about belonging and love.
Godreche delves into these self-deprecating behaviors that were so common among heterosexual relationships of Ernault’s generation. Her layered, empathetic approach to these troubling emotions is the film’s greatest virtue. Other elements are half-hearted, with a nurse played by Guslaghi Maranda (“Saint Omer,” “The Beast”) appearing as a potential leader, but simply disappearing without being considered important. Annie is dismissed as a redneck by the cool counselors, but she develops a friendship with a similarly marginalized gal, a red-haired woman (Maiwenn Barthelemy) who is conveniently inconspicuous and labeled as a lesbian.
The trite, self-aggrandizing coda (which places the film’s key events in the context of Ernaux’s career and the next century’s feminist awakening) feels long and, frankly, a bit obligatory. Still, it’s also welcome to show Annie a light at the end of the tunnel after trapping her so deep in a psychological hole. The girl lives not only to tell her story, but to learn from it.
