Critics reviews

The film’s narrative seems to accumulate rather than progress, its steady (and joyful) monotony constantly subverting any expectations of melodrama. At the same time, Massadian interrupts her narrative with ellipses and direct addresses (which includes, in one instance, an extended rock performance in the hallway of a hotel), wilfully bending time into her own poetic vision of reality.

The most obvious antecedent for Massadian’s thematically direct but artistically abstract rendition of desperate poverty are the Fontainhas films of Pedro Costa. Massadian is less painterly than Costa, but she similarly finds ways to render her characters’ specific situations as artful illustrations of their social contexts.

Without a fixed script, Massadian shoots the intimate mother-and-son interaction with precision and tenderness, framing them tightly in a sort of symbiosis with the modest, yet magical space they have created together – in which there is even room for Leo’s ghost, who has fleetingly returned to play with his young son.

If life is a refraction of moments and repetition then the beauty of being given a body is in the loop of breath and how it changes as days pass. Milla is a stunning portrait of the quotidian nature of life and how it gives birth to more staggering moments. In her film we get a sense of who Milla is and how her everyday decisions impact her life, at first a hazy recollection on the timelessness of romance bursts apart when cause and effect bring motherhood, death and music. Cinema as humanity.

Making her screen debut, Séverine Jonckeere portrays the mercurial heroine with a fierce commitment that more or less eradicates any barrier between the actress and her role.

A quietly moving and unassumingly profound film about growing up, young motherhood, and life's chance occurrences.

With more of a contemplative style with very little dialogue, the strength of this work shines in the great acting and the film's mise-en-scene. All the compositions are very well-thought, with the environment embracing Milla's struggle through natural-lit fixed shots. The cinematography is almost like an art piece.

Massadian cast in the title role a real-life teenage mum living in a shelter for single young mothers. Milla/Severine's mix of tenderness and street-wise toughness makes for one of the most memorable portraits at Locarno this year: vulnerable yet incredibly self-contained. This is no doubt thanks to Massadian's insistence on connecting to the real world, however thorny or even limiting it might be, creating fictive situations yet drawing on emotions that cut awfully close to home.

In Massadian's hands, the minor and the major are one and the same. Rather than slotting into some sort of narrative arc or dramatic structure, each of these moments and the others like them are merely concerned with establishing an atmosphere of intimacy and empathy, which grows in intensity to an almost unbearable degree as the film moves toward its finale.

The inexhaustible pleasure of a cat's inscrutable, unpredictable behavior and on-screen charisma is lovingly touched in Massadian's somber drama of low-wage domestic loneliness. The cat is a touch of solace and spontaneity in a household haunted by a missing spouse.