Ava **** (2017, Noée Abita, Laure Calamy, Juan Cano) – Movie Review 

Noée Abita gives an extraordinary, knockout performance as the 13-year-old Ava, who is spending the summer at the seaside on the French sandy coast with her single mum Maud (Laure Calamy) and baby sister.

Ava learns from her eye doctor that she is losing her sight but her maman decides to carry on regardless to try to spend their best summer ever. However, Ava has a different agenda. She wastes little time with the cute boy who is the son of the beach instructor, and instead steals a big black dog that belongs to the dark and mysterious Juan (Juan Cano), an early 20s gypsy vagrant on the run, both of whom she takes a strong, passionate shine to.

The 28-year-old writer-director Léa Mysius films most of her first feature in the Médoc region, on the Atlantic coast, where she spent her own first 13 years. The heady, dizzying film is very strong in every way, keeping motoring wildly and imaginatively along to its unexpected conclusion. With these desperate characters living on the edge, there is never a dull or ordinary moment. Mysius possibly wants to shock as well as entertain, and so she does.

Mysius brings plenty of style and imagination, but expects, demands, a great deal of her three lead actors, who deliver big time, not putting a step wrong anywhere. In some ways it is a simple love story, but the route to love is both circuitous and startling. Mysius takes us on the scenic route, both emotionally and physically. Being French, the film is very frank, surprisingly so, even a little shockingly so.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review 

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