Sabine Kiberlain is one of France's best actresses, but her first film as director is a tame affair. Its heroine Irene (played by Rebecca Marder) is a young Jewish girl living under the Nazi occupation in 1942, ambitious to enter the conservatoire and become an actress. I imagine her story doesn't end well: I say imagine because the whole thing was so tedious that I left after about 40 minutes, and don't know why I stayed that long. There are far too many scenes of Irene rehearsing Marivaux and she is an irritatingly self-absorbed character, so self-absorbed that she seems blissfully unaware of the danger she and her family are in, perhaps because there was no sign of any Germans. There have been countless films about the occupation of France in WW2, and this is far and away the least interesting one.
Review of A Radiant Girl
