(Brève traversée)
Directed by Catherine Breillat
84 minutes
In French with English subtitles 

Right from the beginning from her first movie French female filmmaker Catherine Breillat threw herself into the world of female sexuality, with all its deeper darker layers... an incredibly complex world. Her work can be visceral and transgressive, but also meditative, philosophical and playful. When she excels she delves into unspoken truths of the female experience. This is one of Breillat's least seen movies and for many it's one of her best.

The story of this film is deceptively simple and almost entirely consists of an interplay between two characters who are between worlds… In this case they are on an overnight ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth. The environment on the boat is a bit like an airport… a dead zone devoid of atmosphere and culture, and all there is to do is to buy something in a tax-free supermarket. Regulations telling people what to do are being blurred out of loudspeakers, and people are being pushed around as if they were cattle. Everything is cheap and crass. And in this artificial world two people meet.

The young boy Thomas is fragile and is a 16 year old Frenchman... and Alice is an Englishwoman in her 30s. She obviously has been around the block a few times and knows the rules of the game. She can be clever, mysterious, and hard as nails. She is impossible to pin down. He is rambunctious and full of energy, and she is more disillusioned, but also looking for new experiences. In a way, he is put in the stereotypical female role of a sex object.

The female actress Sarah Pratt is brilliant, you are thrown into such a crazy range of different emotions as things unfold. This is not the Hollywood angle of sensationalism… this instead it's about piercing situations, and the awkwardness of romance. Not in cute terms, but real ones.

Since much of the film it's about discussing different points of view, some viewers have compared it to Linkletter's 'Before trilogy'—but this one is made by a French woman, and has none of the male romanticism and tricky charm. The last thing it can be called is cozy (and it isn't set in romantic touristy locations). Next to this film, the trilogy feels coy and absolutely manufactured. Brève traversée is a film all of us can recognize, that touches on things that you rarely see in cinema.