Le Souffle

Le Souffle is a boring, pretentious film about a boring, pretentious adolescent. If it had been set in rural England, it would have been roundly derided for its grotesque caricatures and lack of plot. Luckily, it's French, which means that critics of a certain seriousness will tell you it's poetic, evocative and other descriptive phrases that sidestep the issue of storytelling. Don't be fooled.

The film details a day in the life of David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc), a surly teenager stuck on his uncle's farm for the summer. As the day begins, he and his uncle prepare for a barbecue, being held for some of the local men, where David will be allowed to drink for the first time. As the day progresses he gets horribly drunk and this drunkenness combines with the searing heat and his own latent aggression and frustration, leading to violent and disturbing consequences.

However, the plot itself isn't too important, as we're not really supposed to believe in, or care about, any of these people; they're merely ciphers used by the director to make heavy-handed statements about rural life and adolescence. These points are clear enough and powerfully conveyed in some cases.

We see the brutalising effect of country living in a lurid gutting of animals, as well as David's violence. We see that this is a broken society, where fathers routinely desert their children and women seem to play no role at all. Bonnetblanc gives a strong performance, vividly conveying the intensity of teenage, exacerbated by the heat and the loneliness.

Some of the scenes do work on the filmmaker's own terms. The problem is, they don't work on ours. There is no real story to speak of, so at 77 minutes this still manages to feel like an extended short, rather than a snappy feature.

The characters are unpleasant and unbelievable. However much we might sympathise with the pain of adolescence, David is essentially a tedious, arrogant sociopath.

The cinematography has been wildly overpraised, shot in high contrast black-and-white to remove all beauty and charm from the Limousin countryside.

Le Souffle is a film that some will praise, but few see twice.