Danger arrives on a moped.
After you’ve seen La lisière, the noise a moped makes will never sound the same again. The mild irritation you used to feel whenever you heard one of those typical teenage rides approach, will now be accompanied by a feeling of impending doom.
François is a young doctor, who exchanges his good life in the city – with girlfriend and close friends – for a post in a newly built village in the French countryside. Ah, the French countryside, with its vast stretches of gently undulating fields, with long, winding roads past lush forests. Where the light completely vanishes as soon as darkness falls. Where anything could happen in the dark.
The rulers of the darkness are the young – a group of girls and boys, with the mysterious Cédric as the undisputed leader on his ever present moped. At night the group ventures into the woods to play strange and cruel games. Games for which some of the children are much too young, but the desire to belong is greater than the fear. And otherwise there will always be someone there to give you that last little push.
Unease and discomfort prevail in La lisière, where people constantly stand just a little too close to each other, and the looks back and forth are just a little too long and penetrating. Where all the girls are in love with the new doctor and feign afflictions to get his attention. Especially Claire, the only one in the group with wayward tendencies at times, who sees a kindred spirit in the doctor. She is determined to win his love, never mind his visiting girlfriend and the big age difference.
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La lisière calls to mind Michael Haneke’s Das weisse Band, in which it’s also the village children who determine the course of events. Where they retreat from the sight of adults and live in a self-made universe, according to their own logic and with incomprehensible rules. Just like Haneke’s films, La lisière is imbued with an almost unbearable, veiled suspense. And the sometimes very young children act almost disturbingly well here as well.
But unlike Das weisse Band, Bajard makes grateful and effective use of music – the brilliant soundtrack by Mrs Good (is the song Certain Games in the end credits a reference to Funny Games?) immerses the film in melancholy, longing for a world that doesn’t exist, love that doesn’t exist.
There is no comfort or relief: the church is a sterile and uninviting building, and the dance is almost literally a meat market. And behind the beauty – of the landscape and the young ones – danger hides. Danger that sometimes sneaks up on us imperceptibly and sometimes announces itself with the sound of roaring mopeds.
translated by Marjan Westbroek
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