Jamais contente (2017)
Directed by Emilie Deleuze

Film Review

Emilie Deleuze is not the most prolific of filmmakers. She has directed only five films in the past twenty-five years (including two for television) but her work is always sufficiently quirky to arouse interest.  After Peau neuve (1999) and Mister V (2003), her third cinema feature sees her move onto more conventional territory, a portrait of adolescence that distinguishes itself from the recent spate of such films by its barbed humour and uncompromising honesty.  This Les 400 coups for the 21st century offers up an unadorned picture of teenage rebellion which shows just how ugly and disorienting those teen years can be for those who are on the receiving end.  Jamais contente is an apt title.

The film is adapted from a series of three novels - collectively titled Le Journal d'Aurore - that were written over the past decade by Marie Desplechin, whose brother Arnaud is a director whose work should be known to any serious film enthusiast.  With Desplechin herself involved on the writing of the screenplay, the film is faithful to her original work and is wonderfully evocative of those grim years of early adolescence when you constantly feel you are living in a cactus bed.  Impressive in her first screen role, Léna Magnien carries the film marvellously as Little Miss Misery-guts, brilliantly fielding the deadpan humour that generously inundates the film.  French films about adolescence are two a penny although only a few - Claude Pinoteau's Le Boum (1980) and Claude Miller's L'Effrontée (1985) - have attained classic status.  Jamais contente isn't the best the genre has given us, but its candour and prickly humour makes it a refreshing change from the more sentimental offerings we have seen in recent years.

Film Synopsis

Aurore is a typically moody 13 year old girl who has good reason to be cheerless when she is held back a year at school.  Everything revolts her and so, not surprisingly, she is in a state of constant revolt - against her teachers, her parents, even her classmates.  The only reason why her parents haven't already abandoned her in a forest like Little Thumb is their certainty that she would be able to find her way back home.  Aurore has so many questions to ask but no one but her grandmother is able to offer her a sympathetic ear.  When she is invited to join a rock band with some other teenagers she finally sees a way out of her present impasse...