“Rough diamond” by Agathe Riedinger, specious stone – Libération

Selected at Cannes, Agathe Riedinger's first feature film takes a psychologizing look at an aspiring starlet, to the point of descending into moralism.

Parachuted into competition at Cannes between big-budget, big-signature behemoths, the first feature film by French director Agathe Riedinger, rough diamond, will have cherished dreams of grandeur worthy of those of its heroine. Liane, 19 years old and «30k» subscribers on her Instagram account compiling current trends, believes she doesn't have the life she deserves. Looking forward to becoming “the French Kim Kardashian”, she is just about to undergo a casting for a successful reality show – the aptly named “Miracle Island”, filmed in Florida – which could finally take her away from her dysfunctional home in the south of France and her daily life of petty theft.

The fantasy of Miami hovers over the wastelands of Fréjus: this harsh contrast quickly announces what furrow is being dug rough diamond, whose staging balances between the verismo of a Dardenne-style handheld camera and the expected poetic asides (flowers in the sun in the wind, ballet of birds in the azure sky). Let us add these atrocious violins which, in so many French dramas, fall without fail to reveal the misery of the world, and here completes the panoply of a very academic tragic portrait.

Liane constitutes the prototype of a “bigger than life” character cramped in a decrepit routine, which Riedinger intends to erect as the emblem of a