Rebecca Marder in A Radiant Girl (Film Movement)

Teen romance and the looming Holocaust make for bizarre bedfellows in actor Sandrine Kiberlain’s debut directorial feature, A Radiant Girl. Though it contains some charming moments, its mélange of giddy adolescent fancies and impending genocide can induce a sharp sense of disorientation.  

In 1942 occupied Paris, 19-year-old Irène (Rebecca Marder) lives with her Jewish father, grandmother, and brother in a cozy apartment. The family is smart, artistic, and comfortable (perhaps a little too comfortable, with questions about sex cheekily and anachronistically tossed around and brother and sister behaving exceptionally intimate by U.S. standards). Boys are interested in Irène, and she flirts and gads about with them. But Irène’s true passion is theater, and her topmost goal is passing the audition for Paris’s elite acting conservatory. Students rehearse Marivaux, with young men playing lovelorn swains declaiming urgent poetry at a flattered Irene. At other times, the camera zooms in on Marder heavily pouting, giggling, or registering exaggerated surprise. Viewer mileage may vary on the appeal of these moments, which can verge on flat-out mugging. 

All of which does not quite feel right in light of what’s going on in the world outside. Business opportunities are closing up for Irène’s father, who tries (and fails) to get his daughter an ID card free of the stamped “Jewish” designation. Shopkeepers are suddenly unfriendly and their goods unavailable. The family complains in passing that it will have to turn in its bicycles and telephone to authorities, “everything that connected us to the outside world,” in the father’s words.  

In the midst of multiple warning signs, Irène keeps gaily knocking around Paris, rehearsing her set pieces, and acting on a puppy-love attraction to her optometrist’s assistant. Being assigned a prominent Jewish star on her clothing registers as just a trifle to the bubbly young woman. As it turns out in a surprisingly grim denouement, it’s way more than a trifle. 

Perhaps writer/director Kiberlain wanted to make the point that life goes on amid a looming catastrophe. Or maybe she wanted to say that in the middle of an impending calamity, we should pay more attention to what is taking place around us. Either way, A Radiant Girl feels inadequately realized and a little unreal. Inattention to period detail contributes further to the sense of a movie at loose ends and made on the fly.

The film’s focus on frothy teenage fun at the perimeter of the Holocaust frankly feels a little weird. To some, it may register as borderline offensive. Maybe next time Kiberlain can think a little harder about the movie and the statement she wants to make. Both are confusing and a little discomforting here.