À l'abordage

A warm summer evening in Paris; Félix meets Alma by chance. They laugh, dance and spend the night in a park. But their time together is cut short because she is about to go on holiday with her family. On an impulse, Félix decides to surprise her where she is holidaying and enrols a friend in the adventure. They carpool with a young man who gets tangled up in the undertaking. Nothing seems to go quite as planned. A l’abordage is more than a breezy comedy of seduction. After a detour into documentary with the delightful L’île au trésor, Guillaume Brac brings to fiction his assiduous gaze into the depth and multiplicity of the human experience. Brac, working with a cast combining non-actors with young theatre-trained actors, has composed scenes of apparent simplicity that are nonetheless imbued with subtle and affecting social commentary. The summer hiatus temporarily reshuffles the deck and, armed solely with their personality and their artful use of language, these young people are given a chance to redefine their roles in friendship, love and society. (Berlinale)