Seize printemps
Suzanne Lindon (2020)
Oh for a C K Scott Moncrieff to turn French film titles into English … His versions of the volume names in A la recherche du temps perdu emulated Proust’s originals – especially Within a Budding Grove, imaginative but thoroughly true to the spirit of the French (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs). Spring Blossom, on the other hand, is a tired tag for the story of a teenage girl’s first love. It’s true Seize printemps, which closed this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, isn’t easily rendered as English idiom but even a literal translation (‘Sixteen Spring’) would have been preferable. Because it’s trite, Spring Blossom has the incongruously musty ring of an older person’s nostalgic reflections on youthful experience. Yet Suzanne Lindon, at the time the film was made, was only twenty – an extraordinary age at which to direct, as well as write and play the lead in, your first cinema feature.
The sixteen-year-old protagonist, also called Suzanne, is a lycée student in Paris, where she lives with her parents (Frédéric Pierrot and Florence Viala) and elder sister (Rebecca Marder). Suzanne isn’t socially isolated – in the first scene we see her drinking in a café with schoolmates – but she seems removed from the rest of the group and tends to spend her evenings at home, preparing for exams. When, unusually, she goes to a party, she sits on the sidelines, disengaged. After a couple of sips from a bottle of beer, she offers it to the girl beside her, remarking that beer is boring. (Suzanne’s preferred drink is grenadine and lemonade.) The same girl invites her to rate the boys at the party on a scale from 1 to 10. Suzanne declares that rating people in this way is horrible idea. She also says she’d give all the boys a 5.
At this point in Spring Blossom, Suzanne has already taken notice of a thirtyish man glimpsed through a café window. She sees him again, getting off a red scooter, close to the theatre which she passes every day en route to and from school. She’s soon looking out for him and, when she discovers he’s appearing in a play at the theatre, sneaks into the auditorium to watch a rehearsal, unnoticed by the director (Dominique Besnehard) and the cast members. The actor’s name is Raphaël, and he’s played by Arnaud Valois (120 Beats per Minute) – so a bit more than a 5 out of 10. Next time she sees him outside the café, Suzanne sits down at a nearby table and a conversation between them starts. It isn’t long before Raphaël too is trying grenadine and lemonade. He enthuses but has to get back to the theatre and leaves most of his drink. After he’s gone Suzanne starts to sip the remainder, through the straw in his glass.
In time, Suzanne and Raphaël will appear in public together, hold each other and kiss but that’s as far as their relationship goes physically. Spring Blossom is vivid proof that a passion taking place largely inside a character’s head can be as dramatically satisfying as a full-blown affair. Lindon achieves this largely through funny, credible details, illustrating, for example, an infatuate’s need to keep the object of their affections both continuously in mind and a secret. One morning, Raphaël has a problem with his scooter; on another early sighting of him, he’s at his café table eating bread covered in red conserve. At home, Suzanne asks her nonplussed father questions about leaking engines and her mother for a strawberry jam tartine. Her parents discuss going out for the evening. She recommends (though to deaf ears) a theatre visit.
After Raphaël has asked to see her again, Suzanne, as she walks home, breaks into a celebratory dance – the first and simplest of three choreographed sequences in Spring Blossom. It’s remarkable how easily Lindon introduces these bursts of unrealism into her predominantly naturalistic narrative: they function virtually as numbers in a musical – as expressions, that is, of the heightened emotions of the characters concerned. (In an interview for the Glasgow Film Festival, Lindon told Allison Gardner, the Festival’s co-director, that the choreography was Pina Bausch-inspired.) By the time that Suzanne and Raphaël perform a gravely elegant pas de deux on the stage of the deserted theatre, the formal novelty is wearing thin but the intervening duet is a real highlight. Side by side at the café, they listen to a piece of music – she through his headphones, he from memory (the music is used as the overture to the play he’s in). They stay seated, moving their heads, shoulders and hands in unison – a witty, lyrical expression of their rapport.
Suzanne is clever, reads grown-up fiction (like Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) and is an emotional beginner. But it’s she who makes the romantic running, trying to be noticed by a man revealed to be nineteen years her senior. Lindon seems well aware of the sensitive nature of her scenario: at the theatre, Raphaël’s character in the play is called Erastes – a term applied in Ancient Greece to an older man in a sexual relationship with an adolescent boy. The writer-director is doubtless aware too that Spring Blossom could nowadays be acceptable only as the work of a woman film-maker – perhaps only a young woman film-maker.
Lindon’s age brings to mind a French literary predecessor, Françoise Sagan, who was only eighteen when her debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was published in 1954 (and an overnight sensation). There are big dissimilarities between the two, however. By the end of the book, Sagan’s seventeen-year-old heroine, Cécile, is precociously regretful – a frame of mind very different from Suzanne’s at the end of Spring Blossom. Also different is the treatment of fathers. Whereas Cécile’s is a heartless philanderer, Suzanne’s is loving and attentive; so too her mother but it’s the excellent Frédéric Pierrot’s portrait of the dad that holds your attention. This droll, normally relaxed fellow gets concerned by his daughter’s increasingly puzzling behaviour. She arrives in her parents’ bedroom at 2am; when her father asks what the matter is, Suzanne doesn’t seem to know. Allison Gardner commented in their Festival interview on the positive characterisation of the parents, Suzanne Lindon replied that she wanted to express thanks for the upbringing she received from her own, famous father (Vincent Lindon) and mother (Sandrine Kiberlain).
Lindon was even younger than Sagan – and a year younger than the film’s Suzanne – when she wrote this script. At that age, you travel, between one year and the next, what seems a long way; by the time she made the film, Lindon may have felt far removed from her sixteen-year-old self (perhaps especially if the girls playing Suzanne’s school contemporaries really were their characters’ age). For whatever reason – her inexperience as a screen actor (and director) could also explain it – she sometimes over-interprets Suzanne’s immaturity, her ‘difference’ from the other girls. She has shadow movements like tugging at her ponytail; twiddling the straw in her glass of grenadine, she gazes into the middle distance, too determinedly distracted. Lindon is a distinctive and charming performer, though, and very likeable. Her gamine looks (the dark hair and firm jawline occasionally suggest the young Amélie Mauresmo) are complemented by a fine, toothy grin.
The character of Raphaël is underwritten – I assume intentionally and I think effectively. What compels a man like this, apparently well equipped to have his pick of romantic companions, to return the feelings of an eccentric teenager? I didn’t know but didn’t mind. Suzanne’s perspective dominates the film; Raphaël’s lack of definition allows him to be her ideal man – without any troubling qualities emerging to complicate the issue. This only works, however, thanks to the soulful Arnaud Valois. His Raphaël is an opaque but unarguably romantic presence, though Lindon leavens that impression with an amusing detail. Raphaël always wears a suit and tie to the theatre. They give him the look of a cool office worker rather than a bohemian fantasy.
Spring Blossom’s regular supply of humour doesn’t detract from its emotive heft: in combining the two, Lindon achieves quite a balancing act. At the theatre, a melancholy Raphaël admits to fears of no longer knowing how to act; his director tells him he’s just tired. After declining invitations from his fellow actors to go for a drink, Raphaël eventually joins them in the company of Suzanne, who finds herself on the receiving end of an anxiously egocentric, very funny monologue from the play’s set designer (Philippe Uchan). The costuming of the principals at this gathering gives emblems of passion a light-hearted twist. Suzanne wears a fluffy red cardigan over her customary white shirt, and a red scrunchie in her hair; Raphaël has swapped his trademark blue tie for a red one. These wardrobe details reinforce the red motif in the story’s romantic trajectory – the scooter, the jam, the grenadine.
They may show their true colour at the drinks party but Suzanne and Raphaël also know by now that their days together are numbered – unless their amour becomes one of a different kind, which it doesn’t. Without explaining the end of the chaste affair, Lindon makes it make sense. Suzanne breaks down in tears as she tells her mother that ‘I fell in love with an adult and he’s in love with me too’. She soon gets over the upset, though. In the closing sequence, she’s able to stop briefly outside the theatre, grin and walk on. Spring Blossom is an exceptionally short feature – 73 minutes. That brevity seems right for the tale of a relationship that comes and goes quickly (I hate to say like spring blossom, though that was clearly in the translator’s mind). Even so, you feel it won’t quickly be forgotten by Suzanne. And while it’s too soon to praise her namesake’s film debut as memorable, I won’t be surprised if it proves to be.
8 March 2021
