La fille qui explose

A fable morale of sorts, the film revolves around Candice, the titular girl, who in a confessional voiceover describes how she’s developed an incurable exploding condition: she blows up spontaneously, multiple times per day, though, seen again here, she seems unable to die. Her reflections also include musings about the state of world, a recent breakup, and her difficulty coping with it all. Visually, the film relies on a language of crudely polygonal characters moving around in smoothly rendered spaces. Poggi and Vinel draw upon pop culture to reinforce the idea of a reality filled with simulacra, or rather with detached avatars. The world Candice inhabits seems exclusively populated by pop cultural creatures, from Superman to Bart Simpson to less recognisable videogame villains. Stacked against the artificiality of these polygonal personas is a grandguignolesque vein (severed limbs and splattered blood) which renders the idea of detachment in a visceral, indeed explosive manner. Candice wonders about where social violence goes, and the film suggests, implicitly, that it ends precisely in that hypermediated world that we all (detachedly) inhabit. It also suggests a failure of language (a postmodern motif), as these ever-accumulating signs no longer convey the lived, signified stuff of people's pain: as the Candice puts it, «le problème, c'est pas le manque. Le problème c'est le trop.»

La fille qui explose – The Exploding Girl | Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel | FR 2024 | 19’ | Locarno Film Festival 2024, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024
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