Love Like Poison 2010

The intimate, finessed female coming-of-age drama is a French speciality. This notable new example directed and co-written by Katell Quillévéré endows a teenage girl’s apprehensions about sex, death and the love of Jesus with an empathetic sense of adolescence as a solitary pursuit. Fourteen-year-old Anna has returned from boarding school to her village in Brittany where she stays with her mother and her ailing but pagan-spirited paternal grandfather. It seems that sex is in the air everywhere she looks – church included. A pipsqueak choirboy hits on her; her mother’s devotion to the youthful local priest is not strictly ecclesiastical. Quillévéré keeps us on tenterhooks while Anna observes what’s preoccupying the adults, keeps her own counsel and weighs the seemliness of her own brushes with ecstasy. — BG

“Quillévéré mixes this heady brew of contradictory emotions with great delicacy and attentiveness to fine detail.” — Dave Jenkins, Time Out