Normandy, 27th century – well kind of. Horses rub shoulders with helicopters, Marguerite loves Julien and Julien loves Marguerite. They have been fascinated with one another since childhood and know their love is eternal. But Marguerite and Julien are brother and sister from a bourgeois family who is trying to keep them apart to save them. They have only one recourse: to run away.

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Valérie Donzelli’s rise has been fast, maybe too much so: a frustrated actress, she made her directorial debut in 2009 with The Queen of Hearts, became a phenomenon in 2010 with Declaration of War, and directed Valérie Lemercier in 2011’s Hand in Hand. By no means slowing down after the failure of the latter, she took up a screenplay abandoned by François Truffaut for her more ambitious fourth film: Marguerite and Julien, a romantic adventure starring her favorite actors Jérémie Elkaïm and Anaïs Demoustier. A sensation in Cannes, where it played in the official competition, the film doesn’t live up to its reputation: neither madly brilliant nor really bad, Marguerite and Julien advances blindly and is both sweet and absurd. Anaïs Demoustier is undeniably the best thing about this rather lifeless and ultimately uninteresting movie.