Milla

Valérie Massadian
,
FR
,
2017
,
HD
,
colour
,
128'

Seventeen-year-old Milla and barely-older Leo run away to a small port town in Northern France and find an empty house to live in, which they gradually make a home. Two lovers seemingly alone in a cruel world. A love to live, a life to invent and hold onto always, no matter what. Bereft of sentimentality, seemingly simple and profoundly moving, Valérie Massadian’s expansive portrait observes time and the details of life in a unique way. A memorable and transformative work that begins and ends with two different, yet equal, kinds of love. Courtisane showed Valérie Massadian’s previous film, Nana, in 2012. Milla is a new chapter in a series of films exploring the transition phases in girls’ lives.

“When I made Nana I knew I wanted to explore three hinge ages – the moments in girls’ lives when all is in between, all is uncertain, changing. Childhood at four years old, as an age when most children, not all of them, but most of them, are still undomesticated, still ‘savage’, hungry for life, to learn, understand, search, interrogate. Next, 11 to 12 years old, when suddenly one morning the world treats you completely differently than the night before, when you just became ‘responsible’, when your candid, naïve, and playful state suddenly doesn’t fit with society anymore and all becomes serious. Let alone the fact that your body changes, and that sex in between your legs, or that blood coming from it – you have no idea how to deal with it all. And then motherhood as a teen – in a way, both of the first stages together, fighting inside. Teenage mothers don’t belong anywhere. Not with the ones their age who have a freedom that they no longer have, and not with the adults, with whom they don’t yet share the codes or interest. Three stages, where basically you don’t have a defined place in the world ... something like that, and how it renders a person fragile, and at the same time shapes that person. So a triptych, yes. Three films, three girls who don’t belong yet to the world, but manage.” (VM)

 

French with English subtitles