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.