The Dream Life of Miss Fran: when Daisy Ridley reinvents herself (review)
Minimalist portrait of a young woman mired in her anxiety about death and her social phobias, who takes the risk of boring but succeeds in captivating.
The French title (The Dream Life of Miss Fran) is a little misleading, with its fairy tale side of proximity, type The Incredible Fate of Harold Crick. In the original version, it’s more frontal: Sometimes I think about dying – sometimes I think about dying. The Fran of the title (Daisy Ridleyexcellent, in full post-indie reinventionStar Wars) is an office worker leading a dull life in a small, uneventful coastal American town.
She works in an ordinary company, a kind of The Office “for real”, with nice colleagues who all have their little quirks and bring donuts in the morning. But rather than conversing with them at the coffee machine, our heroine is paralyzed by her social phobias, locked in her morbid thoughts. These take the form of still compositions, where Fran sees herself lying in hyperrealistic settings, tinged with surrealism, which evoke the very cinematographic photos of the brilliant Gregory Crewdson.
A minimalist plot is set in motion when a new colleague arrives (the comic Dave Merheje, an astonishing mix of banality, charm and strangeness), who will little by little help Fran to come out of her shell, by introducing her to the pleasures of the different diversions that humans have found from their anxiety of death. Going to the cinema, for example… The film brilliantly plays the card of three times nothing, of the little touch, of muted sensations, like a very fine fabric, which almost tears at any moment, but woven in such a singular and subtle that we very easily get lost in its contemplation.
By Rachel Lambert. With Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena… Duration 1h31. Released January 10
