September says: the disturbing abyss of adolescence (***)

Actress Ariane Labed has been lending her image and slightly unsettling manner for years to a cinema, the Greek one of Lanthimos and its surroundings, which has made restlessness its raison d'être. Restlessness is that contradictory sensation (and, when necessary, way of being in the world) that provokes unease as much as it leads to lucidity. Let's say it saves and condemns in equal measure, shedding light with the same force that dazzles (and even blinds). It was logical, therefore, that the star of Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg would make her directorial debut with a film that is essentially paradoxical, unstable, murky, uneven, and, indeed, unsettling. You can accuse her of whatever you like, but never of a lack of coherence.

It tells the story of two sisters, July and September. The two teenagers live with their mother, an artist who suffers from a mysterious wound, never fully explained and probably incurable. The three, in their own way, have built their own universe that keeps them isolated from a world that seems almost by definition hostile. One of the sisters is extroverted, determined, and acts as an older sister with suspicious energy. The other is introverted, quiet, and allows herself to be dominated with a desire for submission that seems at least as energetic as the dominance of her inseparable playmate. And also very suspicious. One of the favorite pastimes, and which gives the film its title, consists of one of them forcing the other to do whatever she wants. And so on until the first sexual impulse sweeps everything away. It usually happens. Inspired by the novel Sisters by Daisy Johnson, the film moves across the screen like a bad dream in an atmosphere as suffocating as it is powerful. Disturbing indeed.

Once again, as is the rule in the beloved Greek cinema, the driving idea is to rearrange words in dictionaries, maps, and life itself. This is a cinema determined to construct a universe in which the meanings of things and emotions always appear displaced. The characters react to their surroundings with extreme awareness. None of their actions are the product of routine. Nothing is a given. Everything that happens, no matter how absurd and cruel, obeys a perverse but irrefutable ritual. The objective is to give meaning (or nonsense) by exposing its most intimate contradictions to everything that in the mundane world lacks meaning. Or simply goes unnoticed. And so on.

September Says grows until it becomes aware of itself and each of its doubts throughout its first half. Far from idioms or clichés, adolescence is portrayed as a virgin and wild space, wild and untamed. Everything to be discovered. Labed proves herself a director who refuses to bow to the rites of puberty so overused by cinema (by cinema outside of Greece, that is). Hers is a frontal, inward-looking, and, above all, free gaze. And, why not, furiously feminist. It's a shame that in the second half, the film surprises us and itself with a twist as gimmicky as it is unnecessary, extravagantly puerile, if you will. Let's just say that no one, not even a filmmaker with Labed's experience, can resist trying everything in her debut, even the lost paths. Disturbing.

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Director : Ariane Labed. Starring : Mia Tharia, Pascale Kann, Rakhee Thakrar, Amelia Valentina Pankhania, Amelia Valentina Pankhania, Sienna Rose Velikova, Niamh Moriarty. Duration : 100 minutes. Nationality : United Kingdom.