‘Stereo Girls’ Venice Review: A Pop-Infused Tale of Friendship and Loss
Caroline Deruas Peano’s film begins as a nostalgic pop comedy about two inseparable girls in 1990s France, only to transform into a moving exploration of grief, memory and the fragile bridge between adolescence and adulthood.
A film about friendship, as the opening voiceover makes clear, LES IMMORTELLES tells a beautiful and painful story centered on the bond between two 17-year-old girls, inseparable since childhood and now classmates in a small town in southern France in 1992. Blending pop musical elements with coming-of-age drama and touches of dreamlike fantasy, the film by Deruas Peano—screenwriter for Philippe Garrel, as well as his wife and mother of the film’s star, Lena Garrel—combines realism and pop-infused fantasy to capture both the pleasures and the agonies of adolescence.
Charlotte (Lena Garrel) and Liza (Louiza Aura) are so closely connected that they almost seem like one and the same person. They sit together in class, spend all their free time together, share in each other’s boredom, and barely acknowledge anyone else—except for the gym teacher (Aymeric Lompret), with whom Liza has developed a curious infatuation. Charlotte gets along with her mother (Emmanuelle Béart) but despises her father (Gérard Watkins), so she avoids spending time at home, preferring the warmer environment of Liza’s family (Vahina Giocante, Adama Diop).
Music is at the heart of the girls’ friendship. Fascinated by Les Rita Mitsouko and other French synth-pop bands of the ’80s, they form their own duo—Charlotte on keyboards, Liza on vocals—with the dream of heading to Paris after graduation to try their luck as musicians. In the meantime, they half-mock their philosophy teacher and scheme to make the gym teacher notice just how smitten Liza is with him. But their plans are abruptly derailed by an unforeseen tragedy that changes everything.
Until that moment—about half an hour into the film—STEREO GIRLS (the English title) plays like a light, nostalgic, and utterly charming pop-teen comedy. From there on, however, the tone shifts sharply, becoming darker and more complicated as it tries to capture the raw emotions that follow such a traumatic event. To say much more would be to risk spoilers, but from then on the film moves in two directions: one rooted in a relatively realistic portrait of grief, and the other in the realm of dreams, where the protagonist continues to wrestle with the consequences of that sudden rupture in her life.
It’s a heavy blow that Deruas deals to her own film—and, judging from the final dedication, one that may carry an autobiographical resonance—, a blow from which the narrative struggles to fully recover. The shift involves not only tone and rhythm but also settings, as the fantastical world where the two girls once connected (they claimed, or believed, to dream the same dreams) becomes central to the story. Gradually, LES IMMORTELLES evolves into a more intimate coming-of-age tale, about painful mourning and the unsettling transition from adolescence to adulthood, a threshold the protagonist finds almost impossible to cross. And yet friendship never truly vanishes. It lingers in memory, and most of all, in the music.
