At the age of 85, Nobel Laureate-winning French author and activist Annie Ernaux is enjoying a cinematic revival. Her readers have grown up to be filmmakers eager to adapt her feminist and often autobiographical books. No wonder. The lucidity of her prose is unparalleled, and her frank observations on gendered social dynamics and all that baked-in violence are, sadly, still vital.
In 2021, Audrey Diwan won the highest Venice prize — the Golden Lion — for her “Happening,” a tautly produced tale of a young woman (Ernaux at 23) seeking an illegal abortion in ’60s-era France. Danielle Arbid directed a lighter, sexier offering in 2020’s “Simple Passion” (adapted from Ernaux’s 1991 novel) in which Laetitia Dosch goes mad with desire during a steamy affair with a Russian diplomat.
Ernaux’s memoir, “A Girl’s Story,” published a decade ago, is told from the perspective of the author as she recollects being a camp counselor during the summer of 1958. It holds both the romantic ideation of the girl who put a predatory man on a pedestal and the clear-eyed feminism of the woman who holds no illusions about the man she worshipped or the rest of his flock.
Ernaux does not use legal terms like “sexual abuse”; instead, her prose immerses us in who she was and what it felt like to project a fantasy as she white-knuckled her way through that time. Narrative bookends from the present describe in personal embodied terms the meaning of these transgressions upon her. She describes the day before the flock began to take advantage of her like this: “It will be the last day that I own my body.”
To the framing device of memory, Godrèche adds a simply expressed third layer. “Pour Annie” are the first words to flash up when the screen fades to black. In 2024, actress-turned-director Godrèche revolutionized the #MeToo movement in France when she alleged that directors Benoit Jacquot and Jacques Doillon raped her as a girl. She has made this film as an offering to her trailblazing forebear to show the enduring value of seeing formative experiences through her eyes.
There is a striking overlap between “A Girl’s Story” and another Cannes-premiering film that depicts a wide-eyed, bookish girl who becomes a counselor at a sleepaway camp, only to “lose her virginity” to an opportunistic jock who doesn’t care if it hurts. Although formally and tonally a world away from Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” Godrèche’s film shares not just this in-world storytelling but also the meta aspect of an older woman helping a younger woman to reckon with her truth.
In most other respects, Godrèche mounts a traditional period film, powered by crisp images and a heavily leaned-upon performance by Tess Barthélémy (the director’s daughter/ Margaret Qualley’s French doppelgänger). Barthélémy is beautiful, luminous, committed, and vulnerable — and therefore just about succeeds in holding up Mount Olympus as the only character with interiority across the two-hour running time.
Annie (Barthélémy) is the daughter of two grocers from smalltown Normandy and every inch the earnest, doe-eyed ingenue. She is excited, at the age of 17 and a half, to leave home for the summer to serve as a camp counselor for a group of kids in the French Riviera. The parting advice from her mother (an excellent, sparingly used Ariane Labed) is to wear her glasses, read everyday, and to not pig out. “Look up, not down!,” she shouts, as an after-thought. This emphasis on wholesome working-class respectability is heedless of the ’60s rushing toward them, a decade that, by 1958, the other counselors have prematurely embraced. Annie is as out of place amongst them as a Labrador puppy amongst a pack of deadpan, Gaulouise-smoking wolves.
There are several stand-out visual set pieces, shot by cinematographer Joachim Philippe (“Mr Nobody,” “Slow West”) First amongst these is the depiction of the milieu awaiting in the large house that serves as camp headquarters. Topless boys ogle the new arrival, precocious girls look at her askance, clad in more daring sartorial choices than Annie in her long skirt and owl specs. Later, during a fleeting bonding exercise, her roommate helps Annie to belong by applying her eye makeup. They clatter down the stone steps together heading for the smoky room where a co-ed dance party is taking place.
Herve/ H./ Archangel/Amour (Victor Bonnel) are various names that Annie will use in reference to the twenty-something (and engaged) head counselor who steals her away that night. They have barely exchanged words before he kisses her under cover of darkness and then marches her through the grounds back up to her shared dorm room. The choice to show the full duration of their silent march gives us ample time to appreciate the magnitude of the moments before the moments, when whatever fleshy designs this man may have are yet to be realized and excitement and confusion flash through Annie’s inexperienced eyes.
As time passes, camp life emerges as a social trial for our heroine. With the exception of one friend whose facial birthmark disqualifies her from belonging to the clique and a pleasant camp nurse (a frittered Guslagie Malanda from “Saint Omer”), Annie is an island by day and an object for male use at night. H takes his distance after realizing that she won’t be a simple conquest, leaving the rest of the boys to try their luck. Annie takes up smoking and deadpan. “I love you, Annie,” says one boy, from up close. She pauses, takes a drag of her cigarette and responds, “No, that’s desire.”
While the slightly shapeless depiction of daily life lacks the propulsive tension of “Happening,” Godrèche creates intrigue by creating a dual perspective. Annie at 17.5 and Annie at 75 (Valérie Dréville) exist on top of each other. Godrèche uses lines from Ernaux’s memoir sparingly and effectively, keeping the teenager that we see company with the woman that we hear. The latter is wise beyond the former’s years with knowledge about French colonialism and the war in Algeria. Throwaway details like a camp kid’s sorrow over his brother in Algeria are put into a graver context by the older writer.
Meanwhile, Annie as played by Tess Barthélémy copes in two ways with being surrounded by caricaturish oppressors. Her twin passions are: one, making sure that the boys that idly use her body never succeed in penetrating her and two, she doggedly holds a candle for Herve. It will be decades later before she can see another angle on their story.
Flashes of the writer she will become glint when her roommate rages after their mirror is graffitied with “Whores” spelled out in red toothpaste. “Does the plural bother you?,” she parries back, refusing to be shamed. As the meandering narrative progresses post-camp, back home, and onto a new school in Rouen, it becomes clear that Annie’s body is not just surviving what it’s been through but wearing the cultural shifts of progress and that this physical process preceded the emergence of her singular voice.
The final moving lines, read by Valérie Dréville, break the fourth wall and invite us to own our pasts as the multi-faceted, inchoate experiences they were. She talks about the absence of meaning during the eye of experience, and the choices made by setting them down into a story. “I don’t know what this text is” she says about “A Girl’s Story,” and it is to Godrèche’s credit that we can say this about her film too.
Grade: B+
“A Girl’s Story” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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