A very smart film from a very smart first-time feature director. Written and directed by 32-year-old Rachel Lang, Baden Baden has an easy swing, deceptively simple visual compositions and dreamlike narrative leaps. The story will hop-skip-jump to the scene after the one you might expect. It has the spirit of the New Wave, something that might interest Eric Rohmer or Agnès Varda.
Salomé Richard plays Ana, a young woman going through a quarterlife crisis. After getting humiliatingly yelled at by the horrible assistant producer on the Belgian movie set where she is employed as a driver, Ana just quits, taking the production’s flash car with her. She drives back to her hometown of Strasbourg (also Lang’s hometown), where in her self-created summer of unemployment she makes it a point of honour to fix up her ailing grandmother’s bathroom, while the old lady is in hospital. And while she is back, Ana reignites some old romantic flames, chiefly her ex-boyfriend Boris (Olivier Chantreau), a conceited video artist who has already broken her heart.
It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.
