Plus haut

The voices of his four female characters are interwoven in this film’s ‘overture’, as Brevière sets out the principle of his film: an almost musical approach to his four strands of narrative, as he tells the stories of four very different young women, who are nevertheless old friends, but whose lives and ambitions take them in different directions with very different motivations. The first has moved to the country to be with her lover, only to lose him and she has to reinvent her life. A second is an actress attempting to use here relationships to get the part she dreams of, only to be humiliated as the result of an accident. The third is a charming fantasist, the fourth a sensible doctor suddenly confronted by and apparently fatal illness that she failed to diagnose.Each section of the film becomes an elegantly told portrait revealing each character’s dreams and fears, desires, pretensions, and fragile sense of selfpresentation. And the sections interconnect and resonate from one to the other as the women are contrasted in their now very different worlds, in Paris, in the provinces, in very rural France. Plus Haut is marked by intelligent, ambitious and mature filmmaking and Brevière has directed a film that goes beyond the often over familiar moral conversation pieces of young French cinema.