Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
Adolescence leaves a good memory only for adults with bad memories
Lise is on the beach with her family when the police arrive and take her away.
She is accused of murder.
The bracelet (electronic), a device provided by the Criminal Procedure Code to monitor the position of a subject from a distance, is actually an ankle bracelet that the girl wears with great ease.
All the evidence converges against her: two years later, the trial takes place. She is accused of stabbing her best friend to death.
She had argued with her friend because of a porn video posted online, and a knife matching the dimensions of the wounds had disappeared from her parents' kitchen, where she lives with her younger brother...
Now the girl is 18 years old; she was 16 when her friend was found dead. Lise had stayed over at her friend's house after a party.
Footage, testimonies, interrogations, and accusations revolve around Lise's apparent impermeability to any emotion: she responds that she doesn't know what she feels when faced with images of her stabbed friend.
While the father is present and accompanies her to every procedural act, the mother stays away until the end when she feels she must participate in the final steps. While the father is shocked by his daughter's attitudes and lifestyle, the mother seems more aware of the teenager's experiences.
The criminal proceedings continue to narrate the evolution of this story, but it becomes an investigation into the mystery that each of our lives can reveal whenever a deeper look is required, especially if everything converges on that unknown planet called adolescence, an impenetrable and indecipherable world, at times extremely basic, more often inaccessible to those who think they can judge it without understanding its codes and languages.
Lise is the symptom of incommunicability: the generational gap is unbridgeable even among peers, let alone with adults!
When questioned about sexual habits, while revealing the difference between making love and giving pleasure even among friends, she opens a window onto that adult world that, more than delivering justice, insists on judging.
And on the defendant's stand, it seems not just Lise but also her ostentatious apathy, her cold and repellent neutrality, her inability to show any emotion are being judged.
Is she a professional dissembler, or is she incapable of any empathetic breakdown?
Lise doesn't know compromise; she doesn't negotiate even with her attitude. The world that is trying her knows nothing about her and thus offers no reassurances or conformities.
She is what her age, her world, and her reality allow her to be, and adults cannot understand how unbearable their inability to understand is, especially when they stubbornly try to understand.
Except for a slight didactic lapse and an (un)forgivable emotional abandonment, the film is a dark, dramatic, precious cinematic gem: no lightness is allowed, no room for irony. Everything is too serious because the denunciation of incommunicability is not only intergenerational.
No one ever manages to convey exactly what they think, what they suffer, the necessity that drives them, and human words are often like a tin can on which we bang out melodies to make bears dance while we long to move the stars.
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice