Portrait Of A Young Girl At The End Of The 60s In Brussels (1994)

Shot for French TV during the nineties, Portrait Of A Young Girl At The End Of The 60s In Brussels (1994) is directed and written by Chantal Akerman, and feels semi-autobiographical. As the title indicates, Akerman sets the story in 1968 but isn’t too concerned about fidelity to the era; you can see CDs in a record store scene and pedestrians gawking in the background at camera filming the actors. The 60s era is communicated in costuming (a striped shirt, a mod-ish suit), a Johnny Halliday song heard in a bar, and the basic fact that the adolescent emotions explored continue to be felt by audiences into the nineties and beyond.

Unbeknownst to her parents, Michelle (Circe Lethem) drops out of school and explores the city at her leisure. While waiting for her friend, Danielle (Joelle Marlier) to finish her school day so they can head to a party in the evening, Michelle meets a boy in a cinema. Paul (Julian Rossam) is older and a deserter from military service. From an initial flirtation, they walk and talk through the bookstores and into cafes and back onto the sidewalks. 

There’s a vibrancy in the location shooting, and the cinematography is in dialogue with the French New Wave, moving freely with the characters and capturing the city they’re passing through. Circe is fantastic in the lead and her character talks continually about what she is feeling and thinking, but in key moments, we feel it most keenly across the expressions on her silent face. Similar to other Akerman protagonists, Michelle is a liminal figure, in between things, between expressions of her own sexuality and preferences, between her relationship with family and yearning to be free of any and all structures. All of which feels both very specific to the time and place Akerman is capturing, but also expressive and felt in the confusion, loneliness and longing of being young. Contains a slow-dancing-to-Leonard-Cohen type of vibe. Brilliant and bittersweet, and it’s only one hour long. Subtitled copy available on Rarefilmm website. Recommended.