Sois sage

There’s something strange about Nathalie, the girl on the brink of maturity. She regularly causes uneasy situations by coming up with all kinds of dubious stories: that her handball-playing Spanish fiancé has had an accident, that she has a relationship with a lawyer in London, that she likes to cut the nails of her piano-playing married boyfriend, that she is really called Eve. In the meantime, she works for a baker in a village in the French countryside. She spies on an older married man with a small child in a mansion. Slowly but surely, the mystery unfolds. The suspense is carried by powerful visuals, pregnant with symbolism: two similar pillows on a bed, an ice-cream scoop in a murky washing-up basin, two pairs of hands on a piano, a girl’s hand rummaging in a bucket of snails, cutting fingernails until they bleed, teasingly feeding red strawberries to a baby, killing a persistent, randy dog with a stone in the night.
Be Good is the directing début by Juliette Garcias (1970), who studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris before editing many features and documentaries. She has a wonderful eye for detail with which she communicates the drama indirectly and insistently, and a great talent for directing actors, as a result of which the ethereal young Anaïs Demoustier is able to play a glorious role.