57,000 Kilometers Between Us

Bless the little indie French filmmakers.

They're so strange and wonderful and they frankly don't care that you can get rabies from a dead rabbit, or that tortured French boys who role play online will be horrified at such a possibility as a public outing at a dinner party.

Mind you, the film is about none of these things, so much as it is a classic, unsentimental portrait of a teenage girl that just about everyone can identify with who's going to be at an indie film premiere at midnight on a Saturday. I'd say we have no lives, but even that would be a lie. The truth is we have multiple lives, all lived out in different spheres of privacy thanks to this weird quirk of the internet. It's to the point where personal time in a quiet theater is a downright nostalgic comfort.




As the debut film from Lyon-born photographer Delphine Kreuter, 57,000 Kilometers Between Us does a strong job of portraying the etherial sense of being a young teenager in a way that's completely accurate yet impossible to materialize. From the black-light bedroom scenes to the defiant smirk at the fridge door, Kreuter's strong cinematic sense serves her well, and the film casts a strange magic like a light source that doesn't seem to come from anywhere, but is there all at once all the same adding additional depth to the dull shine of underage coping strategies.

Nat is a teen adrift, living in her mother's video blogging fishbowl. We get a peek into why this is when we meet her grandmother, a spry, attention grabbing Vegas-style rockette who is totally disjointed from reality. Nate is the black sheep by way of normalcy in a house filled with approval-craving exhibitionists. Her timid and cautious forays into video cam dating seem fresh and real, and the experience for Adrien is doubly intense considering he is dying in a medical ward with only his computer and her company to give him any sense of stability in his own abandoned life.

The rabbit comes a little later, and it isn't white or fluffy, or suitable for a Cadbury commercial, but the sense of wonder and real joy is sweet enough in that moment to calm the waves that follow long before they hit the shore.

For an independent this is a strong showing of great instincts to transcend a budget that according to Kreuter mostly didn't materialize until well after the film was made. For a first film, the finished product is devastatingly good stuff.