Love Like Poison
Love Like Poison centres on a crisis with many facets. Anna, played by Clara Augarde, is a floweringly beautiful 14-year-old girl who comes home from her boarding school for the summer to find that her father, Paul, has left the family home for another woman. Her mother, Jeanne, now conceives a miserable, neurotic jealousy of Anna's youth and beauty, and also becomes romantically infatuated with the priest preparing Anna for her imminent confirmation (...).
Perhaps the most extraordinary symptom of this unhappiness – that is, if it is actually a symptom, and not rather the single, miraculous note of human fellowship and love that could redeem this malaise – is lonely Anna's increasingly close friendship with her twinkly-eyed old grandfather, Jean.
(...) The film has a wonderful ease and flow: its relatively brief running time is crowded with incident and plot, and yet each scene, each shot, each gesture unfurls in a winningly unhurried way. (...) [I]t is a film whose gentleness and humanity will leave you sighing with assent.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Original title: Un Poison Violent
Duration: 92 min
Dialogue: French
Subtitles: English
Age limit: K15
