大不了就结婚 (2017)

Léa Pool’s 13th feature is not for everyone, and certainly not for the faint of heart. The film is framed as a confessional monologue about a precocious young girl recounting her brief life to an enigmatic female authority figure. Based on a popular novel by Sophie Bienvenu, co-writer Pool’s affecting film tells the disturbing, poignant story of 14-year-old Aïcha (a luminous Sophie Nélisse) who spends most of her days wasting her time roaming around her working-class neighbourhood in Montréal. She doesn’t have many real friends except for two transvestite sex workers to whom she’s kind of a lovable mascot. She lives with her distracted mother Isabelle (Karine Vanasse) and the memory of her turfed Algerian stepfather Hakim, who may have loved the teenager too much. Aïcha cannot forgive her mother for showing him the door, but there’s something left out of their often-shouted dialogue which is slowly revealed. When our wide-eyed heroine encounters Baz (Jean-Simon Leduc), a sympathetic twenty-something musician, she falls for him as completely and as painfully as only an adolescent can…