MUBI

If I learned one thing from watching Blue jeans and Adieu Philippine, it is that Rozier is fantastic at shooting dance scenes. But alas, I learned more than one thing from watching Adieu Philippine, namely that Adieu Philippine is a fantastic film and that I cannot wait to see more Rozier.

Adieu Philipppine is a film distinctly made of two parts. The first part takes place in Paris around a young man who works in a television company, although he has received conscription letters thus has to leave for Algeria in 2 months time, and meets two girls. This part firstly demonstrates the meticulous construction films require while brimming with affection for the medium of video. The second part features the man and the two girls holidaying at a seaside resort.

The result of this is utterly spectecular. The film is simultaneously cheery, energetic and melancholic. Lavish on location photography sweeps the entire holiday and Rozier never fails to insert the appropriate music at various effective juncture. Through this, Rozier masterfully invokes a rather elusive feeling of loss that foregrounds the entire events. Frankly, there is no real plot and that seems to be Rozier’s intention. What we have shot on film here in Adieu Philippine is the last carefree summer, the last few ambivalent drops of freedom. This film is brilliant and deserves to be widely seen. It is definitely amongst my favourite of the ‘playful’ nouvelle vague films (which are in actuality the real nouvelle vague films but I like to delude myself and include 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Muriel).

I was expecting more from this film, but it was still a great ride.

It’s chaotic, it’s fun, it’s sophomoric. On the one hand, some of the visuals are beautiful and perfectly pitched: some of the scenes of the girls walking down the streets in Paris, for example, with the heady pop soundtrack – fantastic. But often the soundtrack swings into the territory of the garish: too much pop, overly loud – you can barely hear the girls talking in the restaurant in a scene which should have been very naturalistic – and there are huge hunks of the movie, especially after they return from their ‘adventure’ hunting down the deadbeat producer – which seem badly edited and misplaced. What was up with that very long hula-esque dancing sequence with the two girls in the holiday camp, for example? It didn’t contribute to the atmosphere and seemed to me stylistically gratuitous, dull.

Overall, though, an enjoyable effort and impressive for a first feature film. There are some gorgeous mis-en-scene, somehow simultaneously imbued with both a kind of quiet reflectivity and a buzzing adolescent energy. The scene with the wasps on the pebble beach is lovely – Rozier is fantastic at capturing the naturalness and vibrancy of youth and at evoking a sense of real speech (although perhaps because much of the script was improvised). In any case, this is real youth, not a nostalgic rumination on youth. I’m not so sure I buy into the relationship between the two girls (they seem quite quick to become chummy with each other, for no particular reason, only moments after fighting bitterly over the same man), but perhaps their fickleness is a perfect fit for the kind of lovely, chaotic, capricious spirit of this film.