Jaime Rosales’ Morlaix opens with a montage: open rural landscapes stretching over hills and fields, cut through by roads and paths. Then, a sleepy town, plain and motionless. The town is Morlaix — though those roads and paths could lead anywhere, here they all seem only to lead to Morlaix. For the inhabitants of this town, the same repeatedly turns out to be true. Some have travelled hundreds of miles to settle here, some will leave only to later return. Excursions out are strictly temporary. Even a trip to the local cinema draws the characters further in: the film they see is also entitled Morlaix, and it reflects and reimagines their own lives.
Gwen (Aminthe Audiard) is a high school student mourning her recently-deceased father, raising her younger brother, and torn between the safe but stifling love of her boyfriend Thomas and the tender but determined advances of the new Parisian boy in town, Jean-Luc (Samuel Kircher). When she and her friends attend a screening of the film-within-this-film, which features the same actors playing the same parts in a fictional progression of the story up to this point, a detail to which the characters are crucially oblivious, their responses to the melodramatic incidents of that story begin to redefine how they view themselves, one another, and their futures, perched as they are on the precipice between childhood and adulthood.
Morlaix is a subtly beguiling film, but that subtlety is the result of Rosales’ artistic ambitions leading him astray — it’s hard to take stock of the film’s strengths when they’re subsumed beneath some truly perplexing creative choices. Fundamentally, and particularly in the film’s first two-thirds, Rosales seems curiously estranged from simple human behavior — characters perform scenarios that feel drafted from cliché rather than reality, acting as if programmed to fulfil theatrical needs, engaging in overly verbose philosophical and artistic discussions. If aspects of this can be excused as satisfying Rosales’ own philosophical and artistic impulses (and, were they more delicately designed, they might), other aspects just ring false: a trip to the beach between teenage friends is written like something out of Enid Blyton, and the same teenagers enthusiastically attending an unusually packed screening of an arthouse film (with no snacks!) is close to fantastical.
And yet the film does have its strengths. Rosales’ methods toward extracting emotional poignancy from his material are unconventional and they undermine the sincerity required to execute this task effectively, but they have a point. Morlaix’s third act is set 20 years after teenage Gwen decides to leave for Paris; now a pregnant mother of two, married to neither of her young beaus but a different man (Àlex Brendemühl), she receives an unexpected visit from one of her old friends from Morlaix, bringing sad news. And this sad news brings her back to her hometown. Once, she saw paths ahead of her, taking her in any direction she might choose. Now, she sees the paths behind her, paths not taken, choices never made. And the film-within-the-film reappears, only it’s not the same film. One’s life, or the life one might have (had), looks distinctly different when viewed from either end. It’s a beautiful observation from Rosales, and beautifully handled, with none of the stilted unreality of earlier scenes, less reliance on verbal explanation to flesh out its thematic concerns, and a sensitive performance from Mélanie Thierry as Gwen, markedly more expressive than the rather soulless Audiard.
Rosales has shown previously that he understands the intricacies of human emotion and the interplay between memory and emotion, and this understanding rescues Morlaix from the peculiarities he’s so inexplicably burdened it with; they fade in the viewer’s memory, as do the lines between reality and fiction, leaving us to query exactly what that we saw was true and what was pretend. It becomes a bittersweet tapestry of life imagined and reimagined, futures avoided and pasts missed, anticipations and regrets. The paths ahead of us may lead us anywhere, just as those behind us may have led us anywhere else. There’s a really, deeply affecting film in Morlaix, but it takes some effort, and some time, to discover it.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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