Tu Dors Nicole

Director: Stéphane Lafleur
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 2.5

Nicole (Julianne Côté) spends her summer, following graduation, having a fling, working at a used clothing store, eating ice cream, planning a trip to Iceland (!?) with her new credit card and hanging around her older brother and his band, which keeps practicing (loudly) in the house (their parents are conveniently out of town). Although the black-and-white photography adds to the feeling of nostalgia (it's set, I'm guessing, in the late eighties, early nineties), there's a lackadaisical nature to this that grows quickly off-putting - I have no problem with movies that drift around with their lost protagonists (see: the films of Richard Linklater), but this never accumulates into something poignant or memorable. There are surreal-ish moments (a father driving around his young child with whale sounds playing on his car's sound system, a little boy having the voice of an adult), but it basically leads to a dead end ... and what makes things worse is the Nicole character is too taciturn with no way of knowing her internal world - every scene speaks to one feeling: ennui.