Suzanne (Suzanne Lindon) is a 16-year-old girl, withdrawn and calm, who lives harmoniously with her sister and her parents in a Parisian apartment. In her comings and goings to school she begins to observe Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), a handsome theater actor twenty years May that she frequents a bar and rehearses and performs in a theater in the area. Finally there will be a meeting that will lead to a romance between the two.
The protagonist, daughter of the renowned actors Vincente Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain (she notably played Simone de Beauvoir in the film Violette) is also the director and screenwriter (she directed this film at age 20 and wrote the script at age 15) of this delicate story of initiation and love between two sentient beings, lonely and bored with their environments and activities.
Despite being a problematic subject, Lindon clearly proposes from her point of view a development where spontaneity and sweetness prevail and surprises with the use of some original scenes that could well be taken as sublimations or metaphors.
16 printemps is a film that looks to poetry but is never naive (and neither is its protagonist) and that is committed to running away from the vision very in vogue in current fiction of adolescence as a territory of conflict, suffering, excess and abuses.
Here she left a report to the director (better to see it after the film, perhaps), which reveals a great cinephile culture and very clear ideas.
Special Mention SIGNIS 35 Award of the Mar del Plata Festival
