In “À Tout de Suite,” Benoît Jacquot’s deft homage to the French New Wave, the radiant young actress Isild Le Besco plays Lili, a 19-year-old Parisian art student who plunges recklessly into an affair with Bada (Ouassini Embarek), a Moroccan-French bank robber she meets in a bar and takes home for sex that very night.
It is 1975, and the song that unites them on the floor of a seedy dance club is Diana Ross’ syrupy theme song from “Mahogany.”
A day or two later, after a botched holdup that leaves two people dead, Bada calls Lili from the scene of the crime (being covered live on television) to say goodbye. She promises that if he makes a successful getaway, he can spend the night in her family’s spacious apartment, so roomy that friends and lovers can easily slip in and out without detection.
Minutes later, Bada and his accomplice appear at the back door. The next morning, Lili flees with them without leaving a note, eventually traveling from Spain to Morocco to Greece, where the glamour of being a “bandette,” her rose-colored term for moll, quickly evaporates. Abandoned in Athens, she is reduced to relying on the kindness of strangers who offer help, usually with strings attached.
Bada is almost as naïve as Lili. A scrawny, soulful hood, this adored only-child of Moroccan immigrants who run a barbershop has illusions of being Robin Hood. Those fantasies are dashed by the guilty knowledge that he has killed another human being and is wanted for murder.
Le Besco radiates the gawky sensuality of a headstrong adolescent masking her fears under an enigmatic pout. It’s the same kind of overeager initiate as Emilie, the sexually curious teenager she played in Jacquot’s costume drama “Sade” (as in Marquis de Sade). Both characters lunge into experience without considering the consequences. As Lili’s life unravels, the clueless comments in her voice-over narration reinforce the impression of an unformed creature whose destiny will be determined by her mistakes.
The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism. This small, nearly perfect film is really about the sad chains of events that can follow when people foolishly surrender to their dumbest romantic impulses.
“À Toute de Suite”
***½
NOT RATED|1 hour, 36 minutes|DRAMA|Written and directed by Benoît Jacquot; in French, with subtitles; based on the book “When I Was 19,” by Elisabeth Fanger; photography by Caroline Champetier; starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordier|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.