In her first feature film, Retro Therapy, Elodie Lelu paints the dual portrait of a young woman looking to get to grips with her femininity without the help of a maternal model, and an elderly woman stalked by dementia who revisits her youth and is lost in the world of her past struggles. Distributed in Belgium on 15 May by Distri 7 and in France on 22 May by Daisy Day Films, the film tells the story of Manon, an introverted 16-year-old girl who finds herself forced to live with her unbearable grandmother, Yvonne, a former feminist activist who’s no longer capable of living alone. Things are exacerbated when Yvonne starts to confuse Manon for her daughter. For fun, Manon plays along with Yvonne’s delusions and acts out the role of the mother she hardly knew. It becomes an opportunity for her to find out the true story behind the women in her family, and to learn how to become one herself.

The film begins in the aisles of a deserted supermarket… As the sounds of the night hum away in the background, Yvonne does her shopping all on her own. We should point out that Yvonne suffers with Alzheimer’s, as Manon and her father – who have severed ties with this cantankerous grandmother - learn from the police who call them. Yvonne lives in the past. Her house is a veritable mausoleum of feminist struggles led in the 1970s. She seems to mourn that era, and she also mourns her daughter, Colette, who died far too young. Now incapable of contending with daily life, she must reluctantly welcome her granddaughter and former son-in-law into her home.

We experience this involuntary family reunion through Manon’s eyes. Over the course of this house-share, which is surprising in more ways than one, the young woman discovers both her own femininity and a well-hidden universal truth: even parents were young once. The act of reliving her own memories is therapeutic for Yvonne, so Manon slowly takes up her mother’s role, wearing her clothes, diving back into her forebear’s adolescence in an attempt to accompany her grandmother, reconnecting with a mother who passed away too young, and discovering herself in the process. She learns more and more about this woman through this unexpected game of role play.

The film interweaves some wonderful themes: the importance of women passing on their knowledge to younger women, the compatibility of youthful dreams and parenthood, accompanying our elders in their illnesses, the joy that comes with activism, and intergenerational ties, notably through music. But when it comes to lifting the veil on the rougher edges of this particular illness and adolescence, the film is comparatively timid. The echoes between the periods of struggle created by Manon and her best friend’s fight for the right to wear what they want at school could have taken this film above and beyond a high school revolt and anchored it more firmly in the modern world it inhabits.

Young Fantine Harduin - who already has a distinguished career under her belt, by way of her appearances in Happy End [+lee también:
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Q&A: Michael Haneke
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entrevista: Fabrice du Welz
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Retro Therapy is produced by Iota Production (Belgium), in co-production with A Private View (Belgium) and Camera Oscura (Canada), and with Be for Films managing international sales.