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Lady Bird returns to France 4 this evening, as well as to France.TV. When it was released at the beginning of 2018, this film directed by Saoirse Ronan was greatly appreciated by the editorial staff of First.
Christine has a plan: to become a writer. But before real life, at least the one she fantasizes from her room while listening “Cry Me a River” by Justin Timberlake (it's 2002), he will have to overcome the frustrating treadmill of his last year in a Catholic high school in the suburbs of Sacramento. Nothing suits the red-haired teenager. Neither her city, which she considers too redneck compared to the Mecca of culture, New York, nor her parents, dumped according to her, nor her big brother (adopted), too docile to be honest despite his piercings, nor her situation social status, demoted since her father became unemployed, nor even her first name. So Christine renames herself “Lady Bird”, finds a blond guy who looks like the ideal son-in-law, dates the most popular girl in the school, claims to live in a villa in the nice neighborhoods rather than his modest house located “ on the wrong side of the tracks “. In short, her life becomes a pastel novel of which she is the only demiurgic author – and a bit egocentric. Obviously, the illusion doesn't last long.
Saoirse Ronan comments on her film, from Come Back to Me to The Outrun
Old diary
The playing field taken by Greta Gerwig seems rather marked out. Friendly-sentimental disappointments, failing communication with the adult planet, difficulties emerging from one's chrysalis against a backdrop of reassuring suburbs and endless prom night : here lies the worn setting of the coming of age movie formulated by John Hugues a quarter of a century ago, and yet. Noah Baumbach's muse has her own way of sketching her rebellious teenager (the backfiring Saoirse Ronan, who confirms her breakthrough in Brooklyn). The cadence is jerky. The dialogues flow with harsh humor. The sketches follow one another without breathing, colliding with each other in a lightness of tone which soon becomes tinged with bitterness. The filmmaker-screenwriter, herself a native of Sacramento, gives us the impression of revealing her old diary (however semi-fictional it may be), without getting to the bottom of things, a bit as if she were leafing through it. at full speed, the Discman pressed over the ears. For fear of indulging too much? This restraint could make the thing seem distant, even superficial. Paradoxically, the opposite is happening: this senior year swept in accelerated fashion ends up distilling a deeper groove, the half-nostalgic, half-lucid look at a somewhat failed youth, out of time, because never savored in the moment, spent ticking the boxes of a to -do-list of Disney first times while wanting to get rid of it like dead skin, in the naive hope of a bright tomorrow. And when that tomorrow arrives, inevitably, we take a look at the retro with a touch of regret.
Arty procrastination
This regret haunts this entire teen movie and makes it the beautiful melancholy heart. It nestles in Lady Bird's stormy relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf, excellent in stubborn modesty), who works hard as a nurse to provide for the family and struggles to put up with procrastination. “arty” of his offspring. How to breathe the same air without straining? A radical solution is proposed from the first scene in the car, painfully ” fall “. Unable to communicate, the two characters continue to send warheads at each other, entrenched in their certainties, with the poor father at the center of the battlefield, moving as a mine-clearer in spite of himself. The real love story of the film is no further to look for. To summarize it, or could almost repeat the final line of the hero of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket: “Oh Jeanne, to get to you, what a strange path I had to take.” Their mother-daughter love has something of this tortuous journey towards grace.
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