‘A Girl’s Story’ Cannes Review: Annie Ernaux’s Painful Memory Reimagined on Screen

One of the most highly regarded recent books by Nobel Prize–winning French writer Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story revisits an episode from her adolescence through the lens of adulthood, transforming what was once a painful, confusing experience into something now understood as a series of abuses. The film adaptation by actress-director Judith Godrèche preserves the book’s dual structure, opening and closing with a present-day conference in which an actress portraying Ernaux reads aloud from the text recounting those events from 1958.

It was during that summer that an eager young Annie (Tess Barthélémy, the director’s daughter) lands a job as a counselor at a holiday camp. There, she joins a group of similarly aged young people, more absorbed in their own relationships and flirtations than in the activities they are supposed to supervise. Annie becomes involved with H. (Victor Bonnel), the head of the counselors and somewhat older than her. With him, she undergoes a first sexual experience that is traumatic, even brutal—though, lacking the emotional and conceptual tools to fully grasp what is happening, she initially interprets it as something romantic.

That encounter—and the obsessive fixation that follows—draws her into escalating tensions with others in the group, who quickly begin to judge and ostracize her, pushing her toward a precarious emotional and physical edge. Back home in Rouen, Annie is left to process what happened and to reconsider her future, as the experience has deeply unsettled her sense of direction. What follows is a journey of personal reckoning and, implicitly, a feminist re-evaluation of that formative summer.

Anchored by an extraordinary performance from Barthélémy—who bears a passing resemblance to Margaret Qualley—Memoir of a Girl (published in 2016) emerges as a reflection on memory shaped by time and reframed in light of shifting cultural conversations, particularly those associated with the #MeToo movement era. Godrèche—herself one of the most visible voices in France speaking out on these issues—largely adheres to the conventions of period storytelling, but infuses them with a vibrant emotional palette: enthusiasm, pride, desire, frustration, and pain, all embodied by a protagonist determined to live intensely, even as she collides with the rigid cultural codes of her time.

It is only toward the end that the film more explicitly articulates its gendered perspective, as Annie begins to reframe her experience through literature, conversations with teachers, and encounters with new friends who help her understand what truly happened. By then in her seventies, the Ernaux who writes and reads her own story—portrayed here by Valérie Dréville—has reconciled herself with her past. She no longer hesitates to claim it, or to tell it.