Agnes Varda, roughly represented on screen by Macha Méril, recounts the last weeks in the life of a teenage girl found frozen in a ditch. You couldn't say that the conception of the character isn't, in its own inverted way, sentimental -- more an existential beau idéal than a flesh-and-blood human, an ambulatory embodiment of rotten luck and worse destiny, or perhaps at its most glamorous a radical rebuke to the bourgeoisie, but so lacking in rationale or past history as to give rise to the postulate (and accompanying dreamlike image) that she has simply sprung naked from the sea. And the pseudodocumentary conceit of retracing her final steps through the testimony of people whose paths she has crossed -- people, that means, such as a passing rapist in the woods or a strictly-business streetwalker, whom any journalistic investigator would have a devil of a time tracking down and getting to talk -- is highly artificial. But the actual treatment of this character is unsentimental in the extreme, and the pieced-together diary of her final days unimpeachably real. Sandrine Bonnaire, the equally unendearing teenager of A Nos Amours, who looks like a somewhat prettier but no less peevish Sandra Bernhard, conveys to perfection that adolescent grudgingness over being handed what is snortingly sized up as a raw deal. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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