Amanda

Paris looks lovely for the most part, until the adult intervention. Still valid in 2020, I was in Paris last week and Cops with large guns everywhere. The film shows vividly the young man growing up and learning the value of family and the innocence and resilience of children.

The young girl playing Amanda is just breathtaking, you just can't take your eyes off her and she is truly marvellous and moving.

It will be a few years before she can see the full film, but can be very proud of the work here

Little Isaure Multrier does a very good role in this sad story. The movie is well done, worthy of view. I would have preferred another ending, something more powerful.

Amanda is unarguably pleasing to the eye, with a visual menu ranging across many pleasant albeit clichéd Parisian locations, with reasonable performances from the cast of stereotypical French characters. This film works well as a kind of emollient to the central tragedy and steers well clear of any sharp edges that a more psychoanalytical or political investigation would have turned up in this essentially anodyne fairy tale about loss and recovery. At times the syrupy score seemed too much, where silence would have served better, but all the stops have been pulled out to create something deliberately optimistic. However, in doing so it plays loudly over a lot of situational complexity that would have been worth exploring, so ultimately leaving this viewer at least feeling a bit mollicudled. I hesitate to be too critical, but there is a certain amount of paint-by-numbers to the plot & dramatic scenarios and a thinness and shallowness to the overall narrative. Still, there's a lot to like in the unspoken interactions between David and Amanda, David and his injured friends for instance which really, in spite of the film as a whole do feel profoundly humane and genuine. Perhaps the key to enjoying the film is to stay with the epynominous weather-vane character Amanda, and her naive perspective on events, as besides that, there's not much grown-up reality here anyway to trouble you.

Life is what happens while we're busy planning. Intriguing premise, but confused characters and weak ending. Best actor is, of course, the kid. Nice camera work, too.

Astonishingly human film. Feels like another era. Captures the essence of compassion, care, and love and its obligations, joys and power.