The Fugitive Kind

Thrill-seeking teen learns a hard lesson in a Tout de Suite

The black-and-white French film À Tout de Suite trails two pairs of larcenous young lovers across several corners of the Mediterranean Sea in 1975. Despite such a jet-setting story, the film’s narrator and heroine, Lili (Isild Le Besco), seems to spend most of her time in bedrooms.

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Occasionally she tumbles into a heated clench with Bada (Ouassini Embarek), her bank-robbing boyfriend. More often, writer/director Benoît Jacquot simply focuses on Lili opening her eyes and rolling out of bed. In one of her first scenes, she shakes off slumber alongside a female schoolmate, although À Tout de Suite stays initially coy about whether Lili consummates her sleepovers.

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The film finds symbolism in Lili’s repeated awakenings, suggesting that Jacquot wants to explore whether a bourgeois, idealistic 19-year-old Parisian can fully come to consciousness. By a happy coincidence, the motif also calls for many scenes of Le Besco raising her tousled head from a pillow and displaying her ripe body when she casts off the covers. À Tout de Suite takes its time to sketch out a credible portrait of Lili’s naivete, but you’ll feel short-sheeted if you expect either complexity or genre thrills.

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At first, the poor little rich girl rebels against her privileged life by cutting art class, flirting with suave strangers, and sneaking friends past the help. Soon Lili catches the eye of the dashing yet innocent-looking Moroccan, Bada, but she only learns of his criminal career after a heist goes wrong. Lili first turns her father’s apartment into a safe house, then flees with Bada and another wanted couple. The legal risks and moral implications never seem to cross Lili’s mind, although Embarek’s performance suggests that Bada’s conscience weighs heavily on him. Lili simply goes along because it’s less boring than her everyday life.

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Based on Elisabeth Fanger’s memoir When I Was 19, À Tout de Suite avoids complexities like the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage becomes sympathetic to her captors. Bada talks about feeling like Robin Hood whenever he shows up in his old neighborhood flush with cash, but Lili’s passivity has no discernible politics. Le Besco has watchful eyes and resembles a French Scarlett Johansson, but the director’s clinical point of view seldom lets the audience share in Lili’s transgressive thrills, unlike Bonnie and Clyde’s more visceral treatment of lovers on the run.

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Jacquot’s quick cutting and grainy black-and-white pays homage to noir thrillers of the French new wave. (Landmark revives one such film, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, beginning Sept. 23.) When the lovers motor along twisty Mediterranean roads or lose themselves along shadowy streets, the director seamlessly blends modern scenes with archival footage from the era. But À Tout de Suite never shows the innovative curiosity of its influences. Jacquot does justice to Lili’s story, but has little else to say.

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When Lili bluffs her way across international borders or stuffs stolen cash into her pantyhose (an image that enticingly blends crime and sex), she treats her adventures as one long vacation. But the money diminishes as tensions build, until Lili finds herself as penniless and alone as any other teen runaway in a bus station. She slowly ekes out a new life for herself, and though she wakes up screaming, she finally seems aware of the harsh realities of the world she chose. The bourgeois can’t play tourist by living outside the law.

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Near the end, Lili tries to blank out her despair with some hardcore trysts, and À Tout de Suite’s sexuality starts to feel voyeuristic. So many French films focus on the romantic habits of nubile women that you wonder if the government subsidizes such projects. During À Tout de Suite’s lulls, you may speculate just how many aspiring actresses were seduced during the audition process: “Why don’t we read the rest of the script in my hotel suite, mon cherie?”