Early in the French film “Petite Solange,” four family members make eye contact with one another in turn in a measured series of close-ups. It’s a quiet expression of intimacy, and the moment establishes their balance and bond as a group. It also illustrates the compassionate gaze of the writer-director, Axelle Ropert, who spins a conventional divorce story into a focused melodrama about the loneliness of youth.
Ropert filters the film’s events through the experience of Solange (Jade Springer), a precocious girl on the brink of adolescence. Her parents are in the arts — Aurélia (Léa Drucker) is a stage actress and Antoine (Philippe Katerine) runs a musical instruments shop — and Solange relishes spending time with them in their creative work spaces. Delight gives way to despair, however, once the couple starts fighting and Solange witnesses her home steadily turn from a safe haven into a conflict zone. Jarred by this new reality, Solange retreats socially, and Ropert captures her dejection in a pair of vivid sequences set after sundown in Nantes, where the family lives.
The director allows her protagonist’s pain to protract and pulsate without narrative fuss; even scenes of turmoil unspool with a deliberate delicacy. Sometimes, a sentimental score distracts from the careful images. But as Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.
Petite Solange
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.
