A bold, haunting story about age
“It’s apparently fun to drown,” says sixteen-year-old Chloé, the sluggish, moody teenager at the heart of Charlotte Le Bon’s debut feature, “Falcon Lake. ” It’s a pathetic line that repeats Cecilia Lisbon’s response (“Of course, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl”) when asked why she tried to hurt herself in Sofia Coppola‘s “Virgo suicide“Unlike Cecilia and her sisters, only Chloé player by being dead, see how long she can float in the lake near her family’s cabin or lie in the road like a deer hit by a passing car. But in doing so, she fulfills the same youthful fantasy of a neighborhood boy in Bastien, the son of a family friend who has come to visit.
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An idyllic Quebec summer passes for the teenagers, who gradually warm each other up despite an uncertain start. Bastien is fourteen, only two years younger than Chloé, but a world away in terms of maturity and experience. When she takes him to parties and introduces him to her older friends, his hesitation is a young person on the verge of transformation: someone who needs to have their first drink, first cigarette, or first kiss. His timidity adds to the film a specific kind of suspense that indicates young adulthood as something both inherently threatening and exciting. When he sees Chloé washing her hair, his infatuation is in full bloom and she is possibly the most beautiful he has ever seen. But when she tells him ghost stories, he can not be quite sure if she is really making fun.
Le Bon’s story, inspired by the graphic novel “A sister” by Bastien Vivesmay lack something in originality, but it compensates for this in both the charm and the boundless chemistry between leads Joseph Engel and Sara Montpetit. Both director and cast handle the film’s balance between melancholy and light humor; there are nerves and anxiety for both Bastien and Chloé as they navigate in their budding emotions and frivolity in the moments when they remember that they are just children. By weaving through elements of ghostly, spectral fear, Le Bon demonstrates his ability to blend genres and styles to create a layered bid on how to grow up. 16mm footage gives the film an eerie sense of texture and color, while elements of the sound design at times feel almost ASMR-inspired.
Chloé’s more bizarre habits soon spread to Bastien, who takes part in her ghost hunts around the lake, puts on a white sheet and stands among the trees while she takes pictures as evidence. Chloé enjoys her dark attitude and asks Bastien to share her biggest fears. She expects him to say the water, after hearing that he once almost drowned as a child, but his answer is far more surprising: to masturbate in front of his parents. And just to prove to him how silly a fear it is, Chloé decides in one of the film’s eye-catching moments to do just that herself and calls her mother to her room halfway through the act. Her boldness and liveliness, along with the inner gloom, are pleasing to see in a young female protagonist, even as she hovers right on the edge of a manic pixie dream girl.
The film’s finale sees Le Bon push the boundaries of his story in an ambitious, albeit somewhat opaque, way; Bastien’s fear of the lake and Chloé’s ghost story merge into an ambiguity that points to deep tragedy. This tragedy somewhat overrides the lasting feeling of “Falcon Lake“ rounding off the film in the dark rather than the sweet longing that led much of the narrative. Still, this is a controlled and impressive debut from Le Bon, suggesting talent on the way and offering a warm, if not always unique approach to the growing pains of young love. [B]
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