REVIEWS
A Girl At My Door Reviewed by Mark Adams A resolutely leftfield and refreshingly off-kilter drama, July Jung’s A Girl At My Door (Dohee Ya) is a deftly intriguing tale of alcoholism and abuse that starts off as a seemingly familiar domestic drama before spiralling off into something more unnerving and vaguely disturbing. It is driven by a strong cast and makes the most of a rural location that should be idyllic but, in fact, is home to some rather dysfunctional people. The film is given heart and soul by a magnetic performance from the excellent Doona Bae (from Cloud Atlas, The Host and Air Doll) as a young policewoman struggling to deal with her own problems, and whose compassionate nature sees her seeking to protect a young teenage girl from physical abuse. The strong cast could well make it an intriguing film for niche distributors, while further festival exposure should be highly likely. Young-nam (Bae) is the new chief of a smalltown police station by the coast, sent there from Seoul after unspecified domestic issues. She tries to be polite, keep a low profile and tolerate the drunken excesses of some of the locals though at home she drinks heavily herself, decanting booze into water bottles and finding that drinking is the only way to get to sleep.
Love At First Fight Reviewed by Jonathan Romney Two young French things discover that you can make love and war in Love At First Fight (Les Combattants), a drolly enjoyable screwball romcom from first-time director Thomas Cailley. Essentially light but with a solid base of grit and mischief, Cailley’s film is about a slow-burgeoning romance between a good-natured regular Joe and a femme who baffles him at every turn. But where the bewitching women in such romcoms tend to be zany and fluffy (the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, as the archetype has been dubbed), in this case she is a hard-as-nails military fanatic who sees life as one big boot camp. The film is a delicious vehicle for rising French star Adele Haenel (so impressive in last year’s Suzanne), very likeably partnered by the candid, comedically astute Kevin Azais. A quiet but well-crafted, intelligent audiencepleaser, Love At First Fight should export healthily to niche distributors, and festivals will love it. It could use a change of English title, though: why go for something so off-puttingly clunky when plain ‘Fighters’ or even ‘Combatants’ would do as well? Set by the sea in the Aquitaine region of France, the film begins with Arnaud (Azais)
n 14 Screen International at Cannes May 20, 2014
UN CERTAIN REGARD
S Kor. 2014. 119mins Director/screenplay July Jung Production companies Pinehouse Film, Now Films International sales CJ Entertainment, http://en.cjenm.com Producers Lee Chang-dong, Lee Joon-dong Executive producer Simon Lee Cinematography Kim Hyun-seok Editor Lee Young-lim Production designer Yoon Sang-yoon Music Jang Young-gyu Main cast Doona Bae, Kim Sae-ron, Song Saebyuk
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT Fr. 2014. 98mins Director/screenplay Thomas Cailley Production company Nord-Ouest International sales Bac Films, www.bacfilms.fr Producer Pierre Guyard Screenplay Thomas Cailley, Claude Le Pape Cinematography David Cailley Editor Lilian Corbeille Production designer Paul Chapelle Music Lionel Flairs, Benoit Rault, Philippe Deshaies Main cast Adele Haenel, Kevin Azais, Antoine Laurent, Brigitte Rouan
Drama comes into her life in the form of Dohee (Kim), a timid and withdrawn 14-year-old girl, covered with cuts and bruises, who is bullied at school and beaten by her boozy stepfather Yong-ha (Song). After yet another beating at her home, Dohee’s equally alcoholic step-grandmother is found the next morning dead in the sea, with the assumption that she rode her vehicle off the road. When Yong-ha attacks the girl yet again, Young-nam offers to let her stay at her house, with the rather wounded pair offering each other a kind of solace. The film spins off in a subtly different direction when Young-nam’s former girlfriend comes to visit and Do-hee’s manipulative jeal-
ousy sees the policewoman being investigated by her own force after the young girl makes accusations that she has been sexually abused by Young-nam. Despite her good intentions, Young-nam finds herself caught in a terrible position in the underbelly of this dark little rural town, with this twisted story getting ever more troubling. A Girl At My Door is an engagingly strange drama, that weaves abuse, sexual manipulation and racism into its apparently low-key story. Jung keeps a sense of blandness to the drama despite the troubling aspects of the storyline, with Doona Bae proving to be a charismatic and watchable lead as the troubled young policewoman.
and his older brother Manu (Laurent) readying to take over the timber company of their deceased dad. With not much action in town, except for visits from a Territorial Army recruitment roadshow, Arnaud finds himself signed up for a martial-arts bout with a local girl, Madeleine (Haenel), who wipes the floor with him until he bites himself free. Hired to build a shed for her parents, Arnaud gets to know the scowling, taciturn Madeleine better, and learns that she’s a rum ’un: a tough cookie obsessed with learning hardcore survivalist skills to prepare for the coming apoca-
lypse. Monomaniac, humourless and brutally unsentimental — and not averse to administering the odd headbutt — Madeleine worries the hell out of the otherwise confident Arnaud. But she is also extremely alluring and he falls for her so badly that he finds himself following her onto an army training course. Here the film skips into a more familiar farcical mode than the cooler, sardonic humour of the opening act. But the army stuff is neatly handled too, with Nicolas Wanczycki contributing a dryly funny turn as a long-suffering lieutenant. Then things ramp up to something by turns lyrical and — in a surprise climax — downright apocalyptic, as the couple desert their manoeuvres to rough it survivalist-style in a forest, with a bizarre and visually extravagant outcome. Starting off in a decidedly minor key, Cailley works up his gently acidic comedy with expertise, nicely working some new riffs on the theme of small-town boredom, and eventually taking us somewhere unexpected as this counter-intuitive love match blossoms among the paintball bullets. The leads are nicely cast, Azais making a sweetly flustered foil for Haenel’s variation on the Ninotchka routine — scowling, serious, forbidding, and yet surprisingly tender when Madeleine eventually loosens up to the pleasures of life and love, in and out of camouflage fatigues.