In this film the adults behave like children and children like adults. The child is Lina, seven, daughter of Aya and Louis, who lives with her mother and Victor, her new companion. Lina holds in this film a haunting and revelatory presence. It had to be Doillon, the French filmmaker who better knows how to film childhood. Lina is, throughout the film, the more astute observer and commentator of her parents’ new desire for rapprochement. We are very close to the American comedies of Cukor and Lubitsch – a couple separates and later we are confronted with their new renaissance… Doillon exalts through a subtle and precise mise-en-scène the complexity of feeling in love and its fickleness. The characters are presented without masks and seek in a dizzying and perverse dance a superior fidelity – the debauchery – or perhaps the Unbearable Lightness of Being? (A. I. S.)
