It was always going to be tough for Eleanore Faucher to follow her outstanding debut feature as writer-director given the quality of the sublime Brodeuses, a debut and an artist I'd mention in the same sentence as Orson Welles and Citizen Kane. Given that Welles' follow- up The Magnificent Ambersons, was butchered by the studio, RKO, who contrived to have it cut with a pair of shears it still turned out pretty good as does Fauchers' Gamines. Having begun with an original Welles turned to a novel for his second feature, as does Faucher. Those of us who are not French but love French cinema have long since ceased to be amazed at the versatility of French actresses who often - Nicole Garcia, Tonie Marshall, Noemie Lvovsky, Agnes Jaoui, Valerie Lemercier, etc, turn to directing but offhand I can think of only Josie Balasko who has published a novel, until that is, Sylvie Testud, upon whose autobiographical novel Faucher has based her movie. There are several parallels: Testud was born in Lyon to an Italian mother and a French father who left wife and daughters Sylvie and Ghislaine when Sylvie was two, and Faucher's film is set in Lyon in the seventies (Sylvie Testud was born in 1971) where Italian-born Amira Casar, as Anna, struggles to bring up three pre-teen daughters, Corinne, Sybille and Georgette, in the absence of their French father who abandoned the family. Faucher displays a sure-footedness in handling a much larger cast than Brodeuses, including a couple of set- piece large family gatherings beautifully integrated with lyrical sequences. The bulk of the running time is devoted to the childhood of the three sisters but Testud plays Sybille as an adult and, in their scenes together, contrives to appear younger than Casar despite them being the exact same age. Though it inevitably falls short of Brodeuses it is nevertheless a fine effort and well worth seeing.
Review of Gamines
