Izïa Higelin in the midst of depression in Blandine Lenoir’s moving adaptation of Camille Jourdy’s comic strip

Blandine Lenoir’s fourth feature film is an adaptation of the comic book The ghosts return in spring, by Camille Jourdy (Actes Sud Bd). After Rosalie Blum in 2016, Juliette, the ghosts return in spring is the second comic by Camille Jourdy to be staged on the big screen. With Izïa Higelin in the role of a young woman experiencing depression, Juliet in spring releases in theaters on Wednesday June 12, 2024.

Juliette, a children’s book designer, has returned to her family to help empty her grandmother’s house, which has been placed in a retirement home. The young woman, who is going through a period of depression, is happy to find her father Léonard (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), aging but still tender and facetious, and to taste his “croque-vieux-gentlemen”.

Her sister Marylou (Sophie Guillemin), an overactive and overwhelmed mother, deals with her stress in the arms of a lover. Juliette also finds her mother (Noémie Lvovsky), a more or less harmful fanciful artist, and her grandmother Simone (Liliane Rovère), with whom she naturally finds a lifelong bond. The young woman also meets Pollux, her grandmother’s tenant. On the occasion of this return to basics, and these slightly stormy family reunions, Juliette will discover the sources of the evil that is gnawing at her, a well-kept secret for years, relegated to the depths of her unconscious.

After addressing menopause in Dawn and abortion in Annie angerBlandine Lenoir focuses in this new film on the question of depression, an illness often misunderstood by those around us, who minimize the seriousness of this illness.

Juliette, who says she feels “in another dimension”, tries to talk to his father, or his sister, about this illness which prevents him from sleeping. An evil reduced to “little anxieties” by those around him, but which Pollux, listening, describes as “tragic dimension”.

Drawing, animals, it’s a whole world of childhood that Juliette clings to, as if stuck in childhood, frozen in a past that suffocates her. What is hurting the young woman, a designer full of sensitivity, who draws her father with three children in his arms?

It only took a few words from his grandmother to bring back the memory of a tragedy conscientiously kept silent for all these years by the family. An opportunity to demonstrate the virtues of the word, and of the truth to bring the ghosts out of the closet, so that Juliette can finally begin to breathe, sleep, live and love without hindrance. Not only Juliette, but this entire family, up to the third generation, scarred by trauma.

In the wake of Camille Jourdy’s comic strip, the director sensitively addresses depression, this often taboo subject, in a film which also embraces all kinds of issues, such as motherhood, or even family, in which everyone is assigned to a place from which it is difficult to escape, even as an adult.

Sexuality and desire are also evoked in an unusual way in cinema, with a mixture of crudeness, humor and poetry, in the bucolic and pictorial scenes of the romantic encounters of Marylou and her masked lover.

In a sensitive and playful setting, in which drawing is invited, Juliet in spring is a very beautiful adaptation of Camille Jourdy’s album, served by rhythmic dialogues, the original music of Bertrand Belin, and above all by the fair and sensitive interpretation of Izïa Higelin, moving in the role of Juliette.

At his side, a fine troupe of actors and actresses: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, restrained in the role of the modest dad, Noémie Lvovski explosive in that of the mother, her joy exuberant and suspicious, Liliane Rovère in that of the dashing grandmother or even Sophie Guillemin, very touching in the skin of this character of a supposedly “strong” big sister, always responsible for softening the blows.

With this fourth film, director Blandine Lenoir continues her work of exploring the female figure, and more broadly human, in its most complex form, far from stereotypes and in a tone that is her own, a slight oscillation between the funny and the tragic, which hits the mark.

On the occasion of the film’s theatrical release, a new edition of Camille Jourdy’s album, supplemented with unpublished sketches, preparatory drawings and photograms which recount the transition from comic strip to screen, has been in bookstores since 5 June.

Gender : Drama
Director: Blandine Lenoir
Actors: Izïa Higelin, Sophie Guillemin, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Noémie Lvovsky, Liliane Rovère
Country : France
Duration : 1h36 min
Exit : 2024
Distributer : Diaphana Distribution
Synopsis : Juliette, a young children’s book illustrator, leaves the city to reunite with her family for a few days: her father who is so modest that he can only express himself in jokes, her painter mother who enjoys life to the fullest, her granddaughter – beloved mother who is losing her grip, and her sister, a mother overwhelmed by a daily life that devours her. She also crosses paths with Pollux, a poetic and endearing young man. In this happy mess, memories and secrets will rise to the surface.