JULIEN

Julien was eighteen. He was playing knights for the village show. Mostly he was on the verge of leaving his friends and family, his childhood playground. He was going to earn his living. One could say: once upon a last time, between the Beauce and the Loire valley, the last summer.
Although this official synopsis is very short, it clearly indicates the main discord you can find in the work of French director Gaël Lépingle. In Julien, the discord is situated between young people and their dreams, between the French countryside and an unknown elsewhere, between childhood and adulthood. It is in the place of this “between”, in its cracks and brief intervals, where the film is going to take refuge in order to invent a style all his own, both grim and sophisticated. On the one hand, documentary material abounds: fields, roads, houses of a landscape transformed into a distant suburb, the stubborn faces of adolescents. But beneath the poses and the silences, Lépingle feels the rumbling of something very different. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)