La Désenchantée (1990)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

This early film from Benoît Jacquot (now a highly rated French film director) is a melancholic essay in teenage angst.  Like many of Jacquot's films, it is centred around one character, an insecure and unloved young woman, Beth, who is trapped in a life which has little to offer her.

Although the film is very attractively shot, it feels a little insubstantial and ambiguous.  The film ends without offering any real suggestion where Beth's future lies, and you are left with the impression that nothing definite has been said.  In contrast to Jacquot's latter films (for example, the similarly framed La fille seule), the audience is not able to form any attachment with the film's main character, mainly because she reveals so little.

Film Synopsis

Beth is a precocious 17 year old schoolgirl who lives with her bedridden mother, Thérèse, a former prostitute, and her younger brother, Rémi.  Living in straitened circumstances, the family's own source of income is the money offered to them by one of Thérèse's former clients, who is known only as 'the Uncle'.  The latter offers Beth a generous reward if she will follow her mother's profession, but she refuses.  She intends offering herself only to boys of her own age whom she finds attractive, not to ugly older men who turn her stomach and give her money in exchange her favours.  In a class at school, Beth identifies herself with Rimbaud's disenchantment, earning the respect of her Chinese friend Chang.

After breaking up with one boyfriend, Beth chats up another boy at a disco, but she beats a hasty retreat after their first kiss.  On the island of Saint-Louis, Beth keeps a rendezvous with her previous lover, known as 'the Other', but they have a violent falling out.  Another man, Alphonse, comes to her aid and offers her a place to spend the night.  Beth's painful process of self-discovery leads her inevitably to the home of her family's supposed benefactor.  She is surprised to find that 'the Uncle' is a respectable-looking doctor in his fifties.  Beth cannot help taking pity on the solitary older man who has waited so long to sleep with her...