L'enfant de novembre

As far as Inga knows, she was raised by her grandparents after her mother drowned. An aspiring writer, Robert, happens to come about her real back story and makes contact with Inga, with an ill-conceived plan to use her as the subject in his first novel without her knowledge, taking notes about her as she goes about uncovering her past.

Acting overall is fine. However, the key failing of this movie is that both the protagonists do not inspire viewer empathy. Inga's reaction and behaviour is too adolescent and self-centred for us to care enough about her and her 'predicament', zings coming across as unnecessarily selfish and petulant, so we just watch her disconnected and unmoved. Robert is too low-key, hesitant and annoying, so we too watch him unmoved.

Only the mother held some empathy from the viewer - a relatively small part, played by the same actress playing Inga the daughter. While the acting was fine, it is perplexing why the director would have both of these characters look exactly exactly exactly the same, which is ridiculous, confusing and annoying to the viewer. Using a more sepia tone to denote we are watching the past is not good enough when the two different characters obviously look identical.

Overall, it is a good enough effort from director Christian Schwochow, given this is his first feature length movie.