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The Girl from Paris review
:. Director: Christian Carion
:. Starring: Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner
:. Running Time: 1:30
:. Year: 2000
:. Country: France
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The original title, Une Hirondelle a fait le Printemps (One Swallow Brought Spring) perfectly describes The Girl From Paris, a work of subtlety and self-restraint about a young woman bringing some happiness and youth to a grumpy old man at the end of his life.
Mathilde Seigner (Alias Betty, With A Friend Like Harry) is Sandrine, a young New Media manager who decides to leave her stressful Parisian life to open a lodge in the French mountains of Vercors. She buys a remote farm from Adrien (Michel Serrault—Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, La Cage Aux Folles), a lonely and bitter retired farmer who remains in the adjacent pavilion, and embraces a rough rural life.
Built on several opposition levels—city vs. rural life, male vs., female, youth vs. elderly—the film unfolds around the relationship between Sandrine and Adrien and the long process of a stranger's "acceptance" in the community. At first enduring the passive hostility of Adrien, Sandrine's simplicity and courage finally mellows the old man and the two develop a strong tie. In her he finds the daughter he never had and the companion he lost and he will quench her thirst for simplicity, freedom and act as a surrogate father. Just like that hand glider she observes in the sky, he lives in a transition state, between earth and heaven, at the end of civilization on top of a mountain where the world scrapes the sky.
Filled with humor and authenticity—this is based on the first-time director's experience as a son of farmers—the film's strength lies in its uncompromising and bare approach, stripped of any melodramatic heaviness. Neither does the film advocate a return to rural roots-life at the farm is harsh and unglamorous-nor does it balance for a more comfortable city life. Both characters have flaws but have been drawn stereotype-free, neither making the farmer an idiot nor presenting the girl as a brat. Both are grounded but afraid of each other and the worlds that separate them. What distances The Girl From Paris from most dramas and particularly American ones is the total absence of emotional exploitation, the most difficult moments for the characters as well the realization of their rapprochement occur off-screen, discreetly, away from our eyes and without the need for a cheesy soundtrack. Serrault and Seigner's performances are rough, sharp and self-controlled, definitely assuring that Spring has bloomed.
Fred Thom
 French Movies: Reviews 2012 - present
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