Review: Spring Blossom Is a Whimsical Portrait of a Girl’s Burgeoning Sexuality

Twenty-one-year-old Suzanne Lindon’s directorial debut was written by the filmmaker when she was just 15, which lends a marked woundedness to the experiences of the film’s adolescent protagonist. Spring Blossom opens with Suzanne, played by Lindon herself, at a café, her classmates chatting away about frivolous matters as she shyly keeps to herself, lost in thought and absentmindedly using the red liquid clinging to the end of her drinking straw to trace patterns on a tablecloth. Here and elsewhere, she makes little to no effort to fit in. Later, she goes so far as to ask her parents’ permission to stay out late to go to a party, only to spend her entire time there nervously walking around dancing classmates and making passive-aggressive comments about not liking alcohol or finding others attractive.

Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of Suzanne’s feelings of resentment toward her ugly-duckling status, and how she imagines herself to be intellectually and emotionally more mature than her peers. It’s a common, reassuring fallacy that allows young introverts to take solace in their loneliness, and it’s one that Lindon gently undermines with a mostly handheld camera style that uses close-ups to emphasize Suzanne’s visible frustrations at trying to relate to others, revealing the insecurity beneath her defensive haughtiness. Suzanne’s desire to be seen as wise beyond her years leads to a somewhat inevitable conclusion when she takes notice of Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), an attractive local theater actor who’s 20 years her senior and who frequents a café on her route to school. Point-of-view shots of Suzanne’s darting glances at the man signal her interest in him, and soon she resolves to catch his attention.

Lindon, daughter of actors Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon, devotes a significant portion of Spring Blossom’s 73-minute running time to following the ways that Suzanne attempts to woo Raphaël, all of which betray the girl’s immaturity. Across a series of playful scenes, Suzanne buys copies of plays in order to walk around the vicinity of theater where Raphaël is leading a production, in the hopes of catching his eye. Unsure of how to woo an older man, she’s reduced to asking her father (Frédéric Pierrot) what he likes in women. And when Suzanne finally works up the courage to go talk to Raphaël, their initial conversations have all the awkwardness of a child being introduced to a family friend.

Gradually, Raphaël grows more amorous toward Suzanne. At the same time, the naturalism of Lindon’s direction gives way to musically charged moments of carefully choreographed and composed whimsy. After Raphaël finally reciprocates her attention with more than social politesse, Lindon cuts to a mounted tracking shot moving backward as Suzanne walks toward the camera as pop music abruptly plays over the soundtrack and the teen begins to dance in the street. Later, Lindon allegorizes Suzanne and Raphaël’s growing closeness through several magical-realist scenes in which they engage in synchronized interpretive dances, undulating their arms and rolling their necks in unison even when their eyes are closed.

Spring Blossom’s chaste rendering of eroticism is such that it skirts around the more unseemly aspects of Suzanne and Raphaël’s relationship. Lindon keeps her focus on the emotional thrill that her protagonist gets out of this tryst over more explicitly sexual encounters. The filmmaker follows Suzanne’s gradually changing feelings about her relationship to Raphaël with patience, observing how it doesn’t make her feel any less alienated than she was prior to meeting Raphaël. Ultimately, the film ends on a note of wistful but placid understanding that finds the young woman attain some of the maturity she assumed she already possessed.