The new French film Spring Blossom couldn’t have come at a more apropos time.
Suzanne Lindon — who also wrote and directed — stars as Suzanne, an awkward, grenadine-and-lemonade-sipping Parisian teenager who is easily bored by her adolescent life. For her, teenage boys are dull and her vapid girlfriends are even duller. She starts pursuing Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), a middle-aged theater actor who’s been in a rut as well. He’s in a local theater company, and on occasion, his director will tell him to pop into a scene during rehearsal and become a tree for no damn reason.
Once Suzanne and RaphaĂ«l get together, they break out of their respective funks, even doing interpretive-dance routines that I’m assuming are there to show the audience how in-sync they are creatively and emotionally.Â
This story of a 16-year-old girl falling in love with a 35-year-old man is being released in U.S. theaters and video-on-demand sevices not long after the French National Assembly unanimously passed a bill making 15 the official age of consent and defining any act of sexual penetration between an adult and a minor under 15 as rape, punishable by up to 20 years in jail. This bill comes after a series of illicit scandals involving adults and minors — from writer Gabriel Mantzeff (who has written of his sexual relations with minors for decades) facing charges for promoting the sexual abuse of children to sexual abuse allegations against the former school-board president of France’s elite university Sciences Po.
Blossom is less a response to those scandals and more a commentary on the decades of (male-created) French films and literature regarding underage girls and how they discover life and love via a relationship with an older man. In the movie, Lindon gives a wink or two to this unsuitable cultural trend. Hell, she lays a big, fat Easter egg in her protagonist’s bedroom: a poster for Maurice Pialat’s 1983 film To Our Loves, in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a teenage girl — also named Suzanne — who has a sexual awakening. What’s more, you could even say Lindon resembles a young Charlotte Gainsbourg — who starred as as the teenage love interest of a middle-aged man in Claude Miller’s The Little Thief and once did a downright disturbing duet with her dad Serge called “Lemon Incest.”
It seems Lindon — who is not a teenager, but a grown-ass woman in her 20s — is well-aware how clichéd movies about intimate relationships between teenagers and adults have become, especially those that come from her homeland. And so she’s made a movie in which things are handled in a smarter, less played-out and dare I say more feminine manner.
Unlike the Suzanne of Pialat’s film, this Suzanne has a stable, loving family, complete with oblivious but caring parents (Frédéric Pierrot and Florence Viala). It appears she’s simply looking for a connection with a like-minded person. Nevertheless, once the foggy dizziness of new love clears from their brains, these two start wondering if this is, you know, a bad idea.
It’s intriguing how Lindon subtly presents a very May-December romance in which the couple is reasonable enough to realize how indecent (and of course, creepy) this looks. Clocking in at 73 minutes, Blossom breezes by. Since Lindon doesn’t pack her film with tawdry love scenes, what we get is a love story that feels much more platonic than carnal. She and cinematographer Jérémie Attard make sure the visuals are crisp and colorful, creating perhaps the sunniest, most sensible movie about an inappropriate relationship I’ve ever seen.
