This zippy dream of love and loss spins a bare thread of a narrative in 10 kinetic single-take scenes. Armelle’s paramour Renaud died three months ago in a forest motorcycle accident, but the whimsical beauty nonetheless imagines him in nightly rendezvous. Her two sisters — one a pragmatist and one a believer in mysticism — disapprove and, respectively, encourage her to get over him or communicate with him via medium. Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s magic potion of cinematic formalism and theatrical dynamics recalls the themes of François Ozon’s Sous le sable while channeling the energy of Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme. This diva of a film is like that French summer romance you had (or always wanted): at times infinitely charming, at others terribly narcissistic, always unpredictable.
