La Fille Seule
A Single Girl movie storyline. As Valerie, 19-year-old Virginie Ledoyen is not just the titular Single Girl, but for all practical purposes, the entire movie. As the film opens, she meets her sullen, unemployed boyfriend Remi (Benoît Magimel) at a cafe, and reveals that she is pregnant with his child. She is not only unsure about whether she should keep the child, but whether Remi would make a decent father if she did.
She is also starting a new job as room service in an expensive hotel and promises to return to the cafe in an hour and tell Remi her decision. The bulk of the film consists of a real-time study of that critical hour. Valerie takes trays from room to room, and the camera follows every stair step, every elevator trip. There are interactions with peculiar guests, but none of them are particularly important characters. The focus is always on Valerie.
A Single Girl (French: La Fille seule) is a 1995 French drama film directed by Benoît Jacquot. It follows a day in the life of a young Parisian woman named Valérie (played by Virginie Ledoyen) who begins a new job at a four star hotel the same day she reveals to her boyfriend that she is pregnant. The 90 minute film is shot in real time, with a very mobile camera style, recalling the French New Wave.
This was the breakthrough role for the 19-year-old Virginie Ledoyen, best known in America for the Danny Boyle film The Beach, and earned her a César Award nomination. Other starring are Benoît Magimel, Dominique Valadié, Michel Bompoil, Véra Briole, Toni Cecchinato, Virginie Emane, Jean-Claude Frissung, and Guillemette Grobon.
Film Review for A Single Girl – La Fille Seule
Benoit Jacquot’s small, dazzling film ”A Single Girl” is so buoyant, sharp-eyed and casually sexy it comes closer than any recent movie to capturing the essence of youth itself. Set in contemporary Paris, this life-on-the-run portrait of a woman of 19 or so, filmed in real time, puts you in the shoes of its impetuous central character during the hour it takes her to arrive at a major life decision. The movie, much of which was shot with hand-held cameras, is so fast on its feet that you find yourself almost breathless as the cameras follow her around the city.
Beautiful, headstrong and mercurial, Valerie (Virginie Ledoyen) is largely unaware of the fact that she turns heads wherever she goes. She is too busy and absorbed in the moment to notice, except when admiration escalates into harassment.
The movie begins offhandedly in a cafe where Valerie has a hurried morning meeting with her boyfriend, Remi (Benoit Magimel), before leaving for her new job as a room-service waiter at a fancy hotel. After some edgy parrying, she brusquely informs him that she is pregnant. His sullen reaction provokes her doubts about the relationship, and she declares that she intends to have the child with or without him. During the next hour, as she plunges into a job filled with pitfalls, she weighs whether or not to break up with Remi. By the time they meet again, she has made up her mind.
”A Single Girl,” which opens today at the Film Forum, continually reminds you how young young really is. Valerie and Remi, although graced with youth and beauty, have barely enough money to pay for their coffee. Both still live with their parents (Valerie, we later learn, has been brought up by a single mother), and Remi is unemployed but refuses to get stuck in any old job.
The film’s most invigorating moments are not the couple’s emotional jousts but the intensity of Valerie’s first day of work. Within seconds of having changed into her tuxedo uniform, she is navigating perilously through a workplace seething with rivalry and sexual tension. One self-styled Lothario makes a crude advance that she rebuffs with a swift slap in the face. A jealous fellow waitress sniffs out the fact that she is pregnant.
Before signing her employment contract, Valerie is subjected to a humiliating interview by an icy female boss who interrogates her suspiciously about her abrupt departure from a previous hotel job. When Valerie explains that she left after being sexually harassed, she is coldly warned that her good looks are a liability.
The hotel guests prove as unpredictable as Valerie’s fellow employees. She interrupts one couple in the middle of sex. Arriving in another suite, she finds herself hysterically accused of having vomited in the bathroom, and a complaint is lodged. Valerie handles it all with a cool aplomb, standing up for herself, bending the truth when necessary.
”A Single Girl” is far from perfect. An epilogue, also filmed in real time, that catches up with Valerie after the birth of her child seems tacked on and sluggish. And in scenes where the camera trails Valerie through the streets, the pedestrians are all too aware that a movie is being filmed.
But with a single stroke, this beautifully acted film rekindles the verve of the French New Wave and gives it a cool, 90’s spin. It also establishes Ms. Ledoyen, who is only 19, as a luminous natural screen presence whose magnetic self-possession recalls the independent women in Jean-Luc Godard’s 60’s films. As Valerie strides through the city, you sense a life being lived fully (if perhaps foolishly) and get a thousand tantalizing glimpses into the world surging around her.
A Single Girl – La Fille Seule (1995)
Directed by: Benoît Jacquot
Starring: Virginie Ledoyen, Benoît Magimel, Dominique Valadié, Michel Bompoil, Véra Briole, Toni Cecchinato, Virginie Emane, Jean-Claude Frissung, Guillemette Grobon
Screenplay by: Benoît Jacquot, Jérôme Beaujour
Production Design by: Louis Soubrier
Cinematography by: Caroline Champetier
Film Editing by: Pascale Chavance
Distributed by: Pyramide Distribution
Release Date: May 29, 1995
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