Passage à l'acte

Arnold chose a short fragment from To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962) and manipulated it by painstaking repetitions; apparently simple, in practice a hell of a job. The radical cutting of the film, an archetypal deconstruction, has the rhythm of a machine gun and evokes admiration while also being very funny. In Assayas' latest film the characters are also followed closely and intensely. Emotional twists in the story are notexplained; people fling themselves passionately and consciously into disaster and only allow themselves to be led by passion, hate and jealousy. With Une Nouvelle Vie Assayas again proves himself to be one of the most important contemporary French film-makers.Twenty-year-old Tina has never met her father and knows nothing about him. She has been raised, for better and worse, by her unstable mother and now cares for the rest of the family. She gets little support from her boyfriend Fred. When her mother unexpectedly shows her a photo of her father with no further explanation, Tina's life changes completely. She makes a clean break with her present life and starts an emotional and enervating quest for her father.When Tina finds her father's house, she first meets Lisa, who is about her own age and turns out to be a half-sister. Lisa has a perverse relationship with a friend and business associate Constantin. Tina, brought up in poverty, dives into Lisa's luxurious life. That is the start of a series of crucial events. The confrontation with her father is painful; he rejects Tina harshly. Then she has an affair with Constantin, who - temporarily - leaves his girlfriend for her.