Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Gaby Baby Doll is the third feature by writer-director Sophie Letourneur after La vie au ranch (aka Chicks) in 2009 and Les Coquillettes in 2012. Letourneur makes films through a combination of script and improvisation, working (up until Gaby Baby Doll at least) with non-professionals. She also takes a role in the film herself. Gaby Baby Doll is a departure – the first of Letourneur’s films with actors rather than non professionals, in this case singer turned actor Benjamin Biolay ( Pourquoi tu pleures , Au Bout de Conte ) and actress Lolita Chammah ( Farewell, My Queen, Anton Tchékhov 1890) . Actors, Letourneur discovered to her horror, don’t like to improvise, that is workshop the script into being, so Letourneur and her brother had to act out scenes as the characters of Gaby and Nicolas before Chammah and Biolay took over. Letourneur’s previous work dealt with ensembles – ‘groups of people generally have fun’, she explained at a question and answer session. Her films are...

  Pictured : A French family en vacances (left to right,  Bérénice Vernet , Sophie Letourneur , Philippe Katerine and Esteban Melero ) , the subject of co-writer-director Sophie Letourneur 's film, ' L'Aventura ', the follow-up to her 2023 film, ' Voyages En Italie '. Still courtesy of Unifrance / Arizona Distribution .   Of all the 450 or so films I have covered in this series over the past eleven years, L’Aventura , written (with Laetitia Goffi) and directed by Sophie Letourneur, has the lowest stakes. In it, a young French mother, Sophie (Letourneur) takes her two children, ten-year-old Claudine (Bérénice Vernet) and three-year-old Raoul (Esteban Melero) and her older partner, Jean-Fi (Philippe Katerine) on holiday to Sardinia, where they drive around the island, staying in various accommodations. Nothing particularly consequential happens for the entire movie’s length (1 hour and 40 minutes), though at one point Jean-Fi complains about Sophie re-packing the...