Internationally this film is called Stereo Girls, but in France it goes by Les Immortelles: the immortals. Between them, those two titles tell you exactly what kind of film this is. First, two seventeen-year-olds writing songs on the French coast in the 1990s and dreaming of Paris. And then something that tests their friendship far beyond the limits of ordinary life.
Charlotte and Liza are in their final year of school and utterly inseparable. From their bedrooms on the south coast of France they write songs, one on the keyboard, the other singing, and dream out loud about the day they will conquer Paris. Around all of that runs ordinary teenage life: trouble with parents, a secret crush on the PE teacher, and a love that is not about boys at all. Everything feels enormous. Everything is forever.
Deruas films that first half exactly the way being seventeen actually feels. Slow motion, split screen, blazing colours, music that drowns out everything else. She does not watch from a safe distance, she dives straight in. “I didn’t want a bird’s-eye view of adolescence,” she said in Venice, where the film opened Critics’ Week, “I wanted to plunge right into it.”
And then, at the halfway mark, the axe falls. The film splits in two, and what follows is darker, dreamier and perhaps even more beautiful. What remains is the question buried in that French title: can you go on loving someone who is no longer there?
Deruas believes in dreams. For her, the dream world is not an escape route but a place where the people you have lost are still wandering about, running on roughly the logic of Alice in Wonderland. Our culture, she says, has tucked its dead away. She wants to bring them back.
That comes from somewhere. She lost her own best friend when she was seventeen. She always knew she would make a film about it one day, but for years she could not, because she was no longer able to separate the grief from the giddy joy that the friendship had also been. She found that joy again only by watching her own daughter grow up.
Stereo Girls, then, is not a film about death. It is a film about how ridiculously huge everything feels at seventeen, and how that feeling travels with you for the rest of your life. Raw, poppy and unashamedly sentimental, in the best sense of the word. It took eight years to make, and you can tell: someone here did exactly what she felt like doing.
