‘Diane in the Loop’ Venice Review: A Teenager’s Quest To Avenge Her Mother Turns Into An Offbeat Coming-Of-Age Odyssey

Almost by accident, Diane learns a detail that changes her life. Intense and somewhat difficult, she’s a girl who tends to get herself into trouble, and one night she winds up detained at a police station. Her mother comes to pick her up, brings her home, and in the tense argument that follows, reveals something unexpected: at 19, three years before Diane was born, she was raped. The girl is shocked by the revelation, but frustrated by what comes next — her mother won’t say who did it, doesn’t want her to say or do anything about it, and wants the whole thing forgotten, exactly as it had been until now.

But Diane (Ninon Borsei) can’t let it go, and that’s the starting point of Diane in the Loop, a Belgian film co-produced by the Dardenne brothers, which follows this peculiar girl in a cowboy hat (she never seems to take it off) as she takes on a mission nobody gave her: avenging her mother (Sandrine Blancke). Meanwhile, the mother has objectives of her own — rebuilding her life, going back to school, and reconnecting with friends she stopped seeing, also because of the men who crossed their paths.

It’s a film full of curious formal choices (there’s a frequent, somewhat frustrating use of micro jump-cuts, as if assembled by someone too impatient to sit still) and a few willful narrative decisions, but beyond that it builds into a smart drama with comic touches, following the misadventures Diane stumbles into while trying to find out who abused her mother — and to do something about it. When she gets a lead on a possible name, she sets off on a journey that will take her far from Brussels and into situations she never could have imagined.

Diane in the Loop is a film that finds an original angle on a subject much visited by recent cinema: unreported sexual abuse and rape, the trauma it causes, and how it changes the lives of those who endure it and everyone around them. The encounters Diane has along the way also illuminate generational differences, the varied ways people confront these issues, and even how men handle these accusations when the subject touches closer to home than they’d like.

The film has some dreamlike elements, a set of rather curious supporting characters — through costumes, settings, and certain scenographic details, the directors flirt with the western genre — and a series of humorous beats that seem to come out of nowhere (some land well, others less so). But past the occasional stumble, there’s real creativity here, a genuine search, an intention to approach a heavy subject from an oblique angle, suggesting there are many ways to engage with stories as harsh and raw as this one. For Diane, it’s the beginning of a life journey that will, in very little time, turn her into someone else.