Full of sullen young women in jauntily angled berets who pout, shrug and chain-smoke their way through the Parisian demi-monde, Stella in Love may well be the most French film ever made. Returning to the same heavily autobiographical protagonist she introduced in her warmly received third feature Stella (2008), writer-director Sylvie Verheyde switches her focus from childhood to adolescence here, drawing on her own memories of teenage nightclubbing and sexual awakening in 1980s Paris. If Eric Rohmer had directed The Last Days of Disco (1998) instead of Whit Stillman, it might have looked a little like this.
Verheyde first depicted Stella in her previous feature as an emotionally raw 11-year-old misfit growing up in modest circumstances in late 1970s Paris with boozy, bickering parents and slender academic prospects. For this loose sequel, she uses the same key characters and hand-held observational approach, but shuffles the story forward to 1984. Premiering at Locarno Film Festival this week, Stella in Love is a slighter and more conventional coming-of-age film than its predecessor, but still an engagingly honest snapshot of the brittle bravado of youth. Working from a screenplay co-written with her 29-year-old son William Wayolle, a seasoned editor who also does double duty in the cutting room here, Verheyde creates a convincing simulation of mid-1980s Paris using deftly minimal strokes, period-accurate music, cars and clothes, some of them from the director’s own personal vintage collection.
Stella (low-key charmer Flavie Delangle) is now a sulky 17-year-old high schooler facing multiple challenges, including crucial baccalaureate exams that could seal her future, the fractious tensions of her female friendship group, and a prickly relationship with her feisty mother Rosie (Marina Foïs), who is bitter and impoverished after divorcing Stella’s louche, feckless, playboy father Serge (actor-musician Benjamin Biolay, reprising his role from the first film, and looking uncannily like a Gallic Benicio del Toro). In the face of constant low-level friction at home, and mounting pressure at school, Stella affects to simply not care. But behind her nonchalant facade, she clearly needs some kind of liberating release, which she finds in late-night Paris in the form of boys and sex, loud music and cool nightclubs. Only when she’s dancing does she feel this free.
Looming large in the narrative of Stella in Love, almost a lead character in its own right, is Les Bains Douches, the legendary discotheque which becomes Stella’s bohemian home from home. Built in a 19th century basement bath-house, complete with its own swimming pool, this iconic venue became a kind of Parisian Studio 54 in the late 1970s and 1980s, attracting an arty party crowd alongside celebrity visitors including Jack Nicholson, Jean Paul Gaultier, Mick Jagger, Linda Evangelista, Robert De Niro, Grace Jones, Roman Polanski and more.
It is here that Stella meets André (played by smooth-voiced R&B singer Dixon), a dancer, aspiring musician and star face on the Paris club scene, who initially appears unattainably cool but still deigns to flirt with her, their comically aloof pose of mutual disinterest slowly softening into a fuzzily defined but erotically charged relationship. This tenderly depicted interracial romance also has an unspoken political dimension, which Verheyde touches on lightly when André is attacked in the street by racist skinheads.
Les Bains Douches also hosted historic breakthrough shows by post-punk and New Wave bands like Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Suicide and more. Verheyde pays homage to the club’s eclectic musical policy with a rich mixtape soundtrack that includes Tom Tom Club, New Order, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Fad Gadget and Parisian punk-poppers Stinky Toys alongside a stand-out scene set to Visage’s gloriously pretentious electro-pop anthem We Fade To Grey. Today, Les Bains Douches is attached to a luxury hotel, but still functions as a club and venue. Indeed, Verheyde was able to shoot Stella in Love on location there, taking advantage of the curfews and closures imposed by Covid.
Most of the secondary characters in Stella in Love are too thinly written, which may be a fault of the screenplay or, if we are being generous, a deliberate aesthetic choice designed to mirror Stella’s own self-obsessed narcissism. Like most teenagers, she is delightful company in small doses, but also a tiresome diva at times. It is never entirely clear whether Verheyde is critiquing her younger self or indulging her to the max here. All the same, this warm-hearted personal project has the texture of emotional truth and some lyrically beautiful visual flourishes, especially the brief holiday sequences in which Stella leaves Paris to visit sun-kissed Italy and windswept Brittany. That lovingly curated soundtrack also feels shamelessly engineered to trigger warm floods of Proustian nostalgia in middle-aged viewers who were teenagers in the 1980s, this reviewer included. Mission accomplished.
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso internazionale)
Cast: Flavie Delangle, Marina Foïs, Benjamin Biolay, Dixon, Louise Malek, Prune Richard, Agathe Saillou
Director: Sylvie Verheyde
Screenplay: Sylvie Verheyde, William Wayolle
Producers: Thomas Verhaeghe, Mathieu Verhaeghe
Production design: Thomas Grézaud
Cinematography: Léo Hinstin
Editing: William Wayolle
Costumes: Annie Melza Tiburce, Sylvie Verheyde
Music: NousDeux The Band
Production company: Atelier de Production (France)
World sales: WTFfilms
In French
110 Minutes
