Small Events

By John Skow

PEPPERMINT SODA

Directed and Written by Diane Kurys

What if Little Nell doesn't die? What if nothing much happens to her? Nell had better be unusually charming, that's what. The feeling here is that Peppermint Soda, a film about an uneventful year in the life of two young Parisian sisters, wavers back and forth across an awkward boundary: sometimes it is just barely charming enough, and sometimes it almost charms, but not quite.

The artistic risk taken by French Director Diane Kurys in this her first film is large. She wants to break free of the artificiality of plot, the storyteller's hokum in which the revelation of character is only incidental to the tedious march of exposition, complication, resolution. Director Jean-Charles Tacchella's likable Cousin. Cousine managed this difficult trick; it simply showed two ordinary but agreeable people falling in love and taking delight in each other, utterly without benefit of story. Kurys tries for the same artful simplicity. She introduces an appealing girl of 13 named Anne (Eleonore Klarwein) and her more worldly and matter-of-fact sister Frederique (Odile Michel), who is 15. The director merely ob serves their small adventures as they grow a year older. Anne, a bit disdainful, watches Frederique conduct a flirtation at the seashore; the two of them endure the strictures of a frightful day school; they cope with their mother (Anouk Ferjac), and she with them; Anne meets a boy at a dance; the school year ends and they return to the beach. That is nearly all that happens.

The year that passed in this quiet way was 1963, though it might easily have been another; the great events of that year did not mark the girls. But in 1963 Director Kurys was 13, Anne's age. She has dedicated the film "to my sister, who still has not returned my orange sweater." Obviously the commonplace events of the film have an intense and personal meaning for her. Some of this intensity is conveyed to the viewer, some is lost. The film offers a sense of the strong, often mysterious flow that when it is finished, we call a life. Yet in the end the viewer feels that Kurys has held back important information, that she has used technique to disguise the fact that there are depths to her characters that she herself, perhaps, does not understand.

--John Skow

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