2023-10-08 00:28:41
by Paolo Mereghetti
In «Normal» the director Olivier Babinet tries to address with lightness and a bit of irony the obstacles that teenagers face in their growth path
There are many ways to “grow up”. What fifteen-year-old Lucie Sturm (Justine Lacroix) finds herself facing is certainly not the easiest: since her mother died, she has to take care of her father William (Benoît Poelvoorde), who suffers from multiple sclerosis, and somehow make ends meet. family budget. Besides of course going to school. Without forgetting her biggest problem: to prevent social assistance from taking an interest in her case because the only solution she could propose is to send Lucie to some foster home, given her father’s inability to take serious care of her. of her daughter.
There was material to make «Normal» a tearful neo-neorealist cross-section but the director Olivier Babinet, who knows the problems of youth well having worked for a long time with the children of a middle school in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in Parisian suburbs (from whose experience he drew material for his César-awarded documentary “Swagger”), avoids the more melodramatic approach and filters the entire film through Lucie’s enterprising and resilient spirit. More than her determination to face problems, we discover the candor of her gaze, her naivety as a teenager and at the same time the strength of her imagination which, through the pages of her diary, makes us participants in her unlikely dreams.
On the one hand there are the problems of the father who seems not to want to accept his illness and does nothing to relieve his daughter from the thousand problems of family management; on the other hand, the burden of everyday life (Lucie also works in a bakery to supplement her meager income) inevitably ends up making itself felt in her school results: what comes to her aid, when tiredness makes her fall asleep on the desk during lessons, is her imagination and the quick wit that makes her invent unlikely but fascinating horror stories to justify those moments of absence, where she ends up processing in her own way the zombie films that her father forces her to watch.
Then, inevitably, come the first heartbeats. The one who unleashes them is Etienne (Joseph Rozé), a classmate with refined features and manners who attract the ridicule and allusions of his classmates. And it is precisely Lucie (without knowing that he has fallen in love with her) that Etienne asks for help to demonstrate his virility in the eyes of the beautiful Astrid (Bonnie Banane), thus triggering an amused and entertaining sexual-adolescent staging destined to end naturally as no one imagined .
By transferring the play “The Monster in the Hall” that David Greig had written after animating a theater atelier in the Scottish provinces to the town of Chelles (also in the Parisian suburbs), the director (who wrote the screenplay with Juliette Sales and Fabien Suarez) dilutes the adolescent fears on which the play was based (the “monster” mentioned in the title is the father’s motorbike which caused the accident in which the mother died) and rather tries to deal with lightness and a little of irony the obstacles that adolescents face during their growth journey.
The film certainly does not want to downplay the difficulties – on the one hand the problem of sexual identity that oppresses Etienne but which Lucie also has to deal with and on the other the need to manage her father’s illness – rather it seeks a way to deal with them with the tools a teenager can have at her disposal, that is, fantasy, imagination and, why not, unconsciousness, as demonstrated by the day the social worker (Steve Tientcheu) shows up at home. And it manages to do so thanks to the excellent performance of the two protagonists: Benoît Poelvoorde, still capable of surprising by playing to economy with a role that could have fallen into easy excess, but above all the young Justine Lacroix, perfect in keeping the melancholy of those in balance he feels crushed by too many commitments and the desire to live of someone who tries at all costs to remain attached to the dreams that his imagination gives him.
October 8, 2023 (modified October 8, 2023 | 00:37)
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