Sébastien Lifshitz’s Adolescentes (2020)

Adolescentes is an amazing documentary film, being the result of regularly filming the development of two adolescents, Emma and Anaïs, from the age of thirteen to eighteen, when they finished their Bac. It took a great deal of editing because the resulting 130-film comes from 500 hours of material. The teenagers are filmed at school, in their families, and together or apart in the outside world in Brive-la-Gaillarde (Corrèze): Lifshitz chose this town because he wanted time to be clearly registered by the change of seasons.

Emma and Anaïs were already friends, which is somewhat unusual in that they are so different from each other: Emma comes from a more financially privileged background whereas Anaïs is from a more modest one; Emma is shy and has a melancholy personality whereas Anaïs is far more outgoing. The film has the outstanding characteristic in that the director has been able to film the two not as actors but as 'real' people who have become so used to the presence of the camera that they no long notice it. Intimate discussions such as the right time to lost their virginity, then talking about losing their virginity, are a matter of course. So too are the tears when, say, Anaïs loses her grandmother, or Emma strongly argues with her mother, and so on.

We follow the pair in school lessons, discussing quotations from Madame Bovary, Emma reciting from Anouilh's Antigone, or Anaïs learning mnemonic devices such as 'Me Voici Tout Mignon Je Suis Un Nuage' for remembering the relation between the planets and the sun, and incidentally the absurdly stupid error that she made in her understanding of the use of this nonsense phrase: few embarrassing scenes, it appears, have been left out.

This film is also a record of the historical events which appeared over this period, such as the Charlie Hebdo killings and the Bataclan massacre, after which the school head assembled the students in the yard to give a speech and the students held up copies of a drawing that was a cross between the CND symbol and the Tour Eiffel. On discovering that Macron has become president Emma isn't impressed, but then she isn't impressed by politics; Anaïs, on the other hand, is very disappointed that Macron has won and seems (the horror!) to have wanted Marine Le Pen to win. In the end they go their separate ways, Anaïs to Limoges to be an auxiliary nurse, Emma to univeristy in Paris.