Calendar

The Bowdoin French Film Festival

• 2/22/2013 | 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM
• Location: Visual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium
• Event Type: Movie/Film
• Sponsor: Romance Languages
• Contact: Kate Flaherty
• - Open to the Public -

Curling

7:00 P.M.
Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

Denis Côté’s singular fifth film, set in a bleak, rural town in Quebec, focuses on the odd, touching relationship between Jean-François and his 12-year-old daughter, Julyvonne. Painfully shy Jean-François works as a handyman at a bowling alley and as a cleaner at a roadside motel; Julyvonne, confined to the house by her pathologically overprotective father, keeps herself occupied by reading and, occasionally, by talking to the corpses she finds in the woods near her home. Though the reason is never made explicit, Jean-François’s irrational decision to forbid his daughter even to attend school may have something to do with his wife’s imprisonment for an unspecified crime. Jean-François begins to loosen his tight control over Julyvonne after the arrival of Isabelle, the spirited teenage relative of his bowling-alley boss. Isabelle slowly draws out both Jean-François and Julyvonne from their isolation; their tentative steps toward socializing help father and daughter discover that though dangers still exist in the world, plenty of kindness does, too.