“Spring in Paris”, the directorial debut of Suzanne Lindon, who was only 19 years old when he was shooting.
So now there is cinema again in most German cities, and the postponed films are crowding in. Not everyone will find a place here, and some long-cherished film projects were not even shot during the pandemic. This gap is now visible, and even if there are only a few pages that are missing from film history, it will remain a turning point forever.
“Spring in Paris” is one of many films that were made before the Corana crisis but are only now coming out. That doesn’t make the film old, but one year in the life of the young director, author and leading actress Suzanne Lindon has a special weight. Today she is 21, she wrote the script when she was 15, in front of the camera we see her playing a 16-year-old when she was 19.
According to its genre, it is a coming-of-age film, a story about a first love. Everyone knows how precious this time is in everyone’s life, and it is rare that a young person has the opportunity and the talent to spin a film from it in a timely manner. That is enough of an event. But to see him now, with the pandemic behind him, also means to think of all the young people who have been robbed of the treasure this film tells about by curfew, school closings and the loss of social life.
“Spring in Paris” is the German title of “Seize Printemps”, you can see little more of Paris than a few streets in the Montmartre district between the apartment of the girl, who is called Suzanne like the director, and a small theater. This is the attraction of the way to school, out of curiosity Suzanne sneaks in once and hides during a rehearsal. It is the opposite world to the everyday life of the young people in her class, among whom Suzanne feels like an outsider. The theater is an adult world, but not that of its somewhat culturally distant parents (Lindon himself is the daughter of a famous actor couple, Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon). And then there is Raphaël, the 35-year-old leading actor in the upcoming production, who exerts an unprecedented attraction for Suzanne.
French cinema is full of love stories in which age differences are overcome, but when do you see them from the perspective of young people? How often is the power imbalance associated with disproportionate relationships ignored if sexist ideas about the mostly female minors do not resonate?
Without a sexual component
Lindon might make things a little easier for herself if she lets the looming love story get by without a sexual component. The girl’s endeavor to achieve forms of rapprochement that she has never learned anywhere is conveyed in an extremely credible manner. Less convincing is what fascinates the educated and attractive man about his unequal acquaintance. In any case, he does not express sexual interest. In this 72-minute debut, Lindon gives all the more space to the world of projections – the preferred space for unfulfilled love stories. In three choreographies that emerge fluently from the game, she breaks with the otherwise prevailing naturalism. Once, Raphaël plays an opera aria over headphones, which inspires a poetic pas de deux of two upper bodies behind coffee tables.
Of course, this debut film also has its problems, the biggest one being a certain overwhelming demand for Lindon as her own leading actress. It can be seen in almost every shot, as if there were no other ways to get this story to be read in the first person singular. But anyone who invents cinema for themselves has every right to try things out first. When the poet Jean Cocteau made his first film, he did not know that cameras were placed on cars to record driving. Instead, he placed the actors on rolling coasters. The problem with most of the first films is not the amateurish, but the uniform in professionalism.
You can be sure that you will be able to see many more films by Suzanne Lindon. And I can hope that, despite all the professionalization that goes with it, it will remain as personal as this rare document of a youth that was filmed when it happened.
Spring in Paris. F 2020. Director: Suzanne Lindon. 72 minutes.
