Hélène Merlin 's Cassandre is an initiationdrama centered on an awakening teenager, in the midst of a seemingly peaceful summer marked by muted tension. The film follows 14-year-old Cassandre as she spends the vacations at the family manor, alongside her parents and brother. Her body changes, as do her eyes, and everything around her seems to be trying to make sense of this metamorphosis.
To escape the oppressive climate, she joins a riding school, where she finds a different, more instinctive and freer relationship with the world. For her, it becomes a life-saving escape, a parenthesis where she can reinvent herself, far from the intrusive gaze of the family unit.
Cassandre will be shown on the big screen from April 2, 2025.
Synopsis: Summer 1998. Countryside. Cassandre is 14. Her parents and older brother notice that her body has changed. Fortunately, Cassandre has a passion for horses and joins a small equestrian center for the vacations, where she is adopted as a strange animal. There, she discovers a different kind of normalcy that gradually extracts her from a family body that is swallowing her up...
Cassandra is likely to appeal to audiences with a penchant for tales of adolescence, French auteur films and intimate portraits of women. Those who enjoyed Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman or Audrey Diwan's L'Événement might find here a similar focus on sensory experience, awakening to the world and the conflict between the intimate self and the family setting.
Hélène Merlin 's introspective tone and potentially delicate direction place this film in a tradition of demanding French cinema, aimed at an audience seeking intimate narratives, carried by a singular young heroine. The film's summery, rural ambience adds to the feeling of an oppressive cocoon, conducive to introspection.
With Cassandre, Hélène Merlin offers a poetic and sensitive drama about the passage to adulthood, between the reappropriation of the body and the quest for emancipation. Starring Billie Blain and accompanied by Zabou Breitman and Éric Ruf, the film promises to be a poignant portrait of adolescence at its most sensitive, between silence and revolt.
This article is based on information available online; we have not yet viewed the film or series mentioned.
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