Fresh from the BFI London Film Festival, a slow-burning but ultimately rewarding tale of homecoming...

Generic film terminology is a risky and often misleading business. For instance, the archetypal ‘Hollywood’ films of old bring to mind high production values, dashingly suave heroes and seductive femme fatales, movies with a heart like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Now ‘Hollywood’ stands more for expensive action flicks, full of clichéd set piece scenes, conceptually driven and churned out like a processed wiener. ‘Art House films,’ on the other hand, tend to involve the ‘auteur’ and would once have involved Renoir, Fellini, Bergman and other European directors. Now, though, the term seems to constitute cheap, loss-making films where little happens and which rarely see the light of day outside of festivals and DVDs.

I’m not saying I agree with either stereotype, but you can thus imagine my fear when fifteen minutes into director Katell Quillévéré’s first feature film Love Like Poison, with the plot slowly meandering, I found that the film was painting a picture rather than telling a story. Thankfully, however, first impressions are not fixed, and the longer we follow fourteen year-old Anne navigate her way through complex questions of religious belief, love and sex, the more compelling the film becomes.

Set in a rural French town, Anne (Clara Augarde) returns from a Catholic boarding to find her father has left, her grandfather is on his deathbed, and her mother – a devout Catholic – is in expectation of a divorce. Things start to get interesting when Anne meets local boy Pierre who, amusingly, is smaller than her but who is not shy in expressing his feelings which she squares with her own developing body and urges.

The result is that each character - and there is something of an ensemble feel about the film - has to question their own beliefs in the face of religion with the help of the local Priest Père François, who is the unifying force of the film. The good and bad sides to love are on show here, the violent poison that is the original French title is a reference to the Serge Gainsbourg song to which this story takes inspiration.

Surprisingly, given the above, music is one of the areas that could have been improved. It feels disjointed, flitting between having almost no original composition, and mixing the heavy organ sound of the opening scene with Greensleeves, and a few unnecessary folk songs which seemed to add little to the atmosphere. This was capped off with a remake of Radiohead’s Creep sung by Scala, which worked in its own right, but was not really in keeping with the film. It is often suggested that a director’s first film is his most autobiographical, and perhaps the choice of songs reflects the personal taste of Quillévéré. In any case it is not enough to detract from a highly promising work from a very talented filmmaker.

Release date TBA.

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