Director: Maarten de Bruijne
Writer: Maarten de Bruijne
Cast: Chloé Larrère & Delphine Cheverry
Running time: 16mins
Despite being a film of few words, Maarten de Bruijne’s light-touch story is still simmering with familial resentment, and dying dreams. He does as much to set the scene for this with the use of different mediums as he does with direct storytelling – the gorgeous black-and-white photography of Lenny Somers only giving way to bursts of glorious technicolour when a VHS camcorder is trained our wantaway protagonist Jeanne.
In our opening scene, Jeanne speaks directly to the buzzing camera, delivering dialogue a modern audience would see as stilted and unnatural. You might sniff that the titular audition isn’t going all that well, until you learn that her only frame of reference – a speech from the 1937 version of A Star is Born; which she watches as part of her nightly routine with her mother. While her impression is still a little way off the mark, suddenly her strangely affected English, performatively fluttering eyelashes and wilting glances down at the floor make more sense.
Just as she reaches the end of the monologue, her mother calls for her from the next room – and she visibly snaps back to a natural, hurried delivery which remains in place throughout the rest of the story. Packing the camera away in a suitcase hidden under her bed, she returns to her life as her mother’s sole carer; and the film’s colour ebbs away once more. This not only underlines the core theme of the story – Jeanne’s desperate desire to escape the drudgery of maintaining her ailing mother’s farm in rural Belgium – but also the brilliance of the lead performance from Chloé Larrè. It is a very accomplished faux-performance that she gives as Jeanne, managing to move from the starched collar of the opening scene – which seems awkward and insincere, but without ever becoming the kind of cartoonish ‘bad acting’ often present in Hollywood films about the craft – to the realistic sense of fear and anger she conveys in the rest of the film.
That is important, because this is not just a story of a lonely caregiver, doing what she must out of love, while dreaming of a better life in spite of herself. This is a story of bitterness and manipulation, in which the exact nature of Jeanne’s mother’s sickness is left ambiguous – but increasingly it seems as though however serious it may or may not be, she is exaggerating it further to clip the wings of her daughter.
In one telling scene, she sits before an ancient television set with Jeanne – the usual VHS rendition of A Star is Born flickering across the cathode-lit glass – she interrupts the monologue her daughter holds so dear (tellingly, about escape, about going away, about being happy someplace else) to snap, “Everyone always complains life is too short. Nobody ever admits it’s too long.” Her blank, hanging expression speaks of someone who wanted to be somewhere else, but the opportunity passed them over (possibly because of her illness, or possibly because she conceived Jeanne – something she might have used as a means to guilt her daughter into ignoring her own aspirations).
At the same time, the silent look her daughter shoots her screams a desire to throw the quip back at her – as a self-centred platitude it is easier to throw out there when you’re living on someone else’s free labour. But her sense of obligation stands in the way of her true feelings, and she sits in timid silence instead.
After another arduous day of sweeping the barn and walking cows to and from their pastures, the situation comes to a head in a way you might well have anticipated. The somewhat cliched Chekhov’s suitcase from earlier inevitably has something to do with it – at which point a new level of chillingly convincing spite drips forth from Jeanne’s mother. Delphine Cheverry puts in an excellent dual-performance of her own in this regard – moving seamlessly from the helpless and feeble figure of earlier scenes, to a determined and imperious source of torment for her on-screen daughter.
Indeed, Larrère and Cheverry are so good that it’s as close to a disappointment as De Bruijne’s short film comes that we don’t get to see more of their sparring. Some more room for to-and-fro between the pair, teasing the true personalities of both characters in a way that would give the performers more to get their teeth into would have been a joy to watch. But as it is, there is enough here to leave us wanting more at the very least – and that’s nothing to be sniffed at.
At the same time, the way things are means that the balance between kitchen-sink realism and abstract symbolism remains very well done. In the ending for example, we move from a downbeat Kes-style ending; to a moment of cruelly-comedic contemplation; to stylistic, ambiguous final shot in which we must draw our own conclusions from the brightening and fading of a lantern. It feels as though Ken Loach and David Lynch converged to direct a gender-swapped reboot of Steptoe & Son.
If you couldn’t guess from that last sentence: that is something I absolutely love; and would love to see more of from De Bruijne and his very talented team. While L’Audition de Jeanne might depict a dour world of missed opportunities and closing doors, but I suspect that the actual future of these artists will be bright, and filled with success.