Locarno Review: The Exploding Girl (2024)
Locarno Film Festival
Corti d’Autore
Life is not easy for Candice, the titular protagonist of Caroline Poggi’s and Jonathan Vinel’s animated short The Exploding Girl, that competes in the Pardi di Domani Official Selection at Locarno. She explodes, literary so, multiple times every day, for several months. So far, she exploded 192 times.
Her limbs are torn, one of her eyes is artificial and one of her ears is replaced by a piece of cloth. No matter if she is alone or surrounded by people, she can sense the explosion coming, but cannot prevent it. And she has to deal with the mess and the waste afterwards.
Of course, it is all a metaphor, potentially the best metaphor for the contemporary lifestyle that brings a ton of stress and a truckload of anxiety to individuals. Our protagonist sees the language as dead, she cannot express herself. All her friends left her and the doctor advised her to stop listening to the world. But is detachment the solution? Are we superheroes, as the creators of the film suggest when portraying the people she passes by as cartoon characters, or “factories of atrocities”, as she sees humankind?
There is a striking level of detail in this feel-bad short animation, and some of those will get stuck in the viewers’ minds. Although the principal method of delivery is the narration (voiced by Grace Seri), the world-building that Pogi and Vinel exercise is a masterclass of “show rather than tell” script economy, and the 3D animation by Saradibiza and Lucien Krampf is ideally suited to portray the complex topic. Along with Vinel’s rapid, resolute editing and the synth-heavy score by Malibu that creates the mood, The Exploding Girl can be interpreted as a pretty accurate “documentary” portrait of our world on an emotional level.
Original title:
La fille qui explose
Year:
2024.
Runtime:
19’ 01’’
Country:
France
Language:
French
Directed by:
Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
Written
by: Caroline Poggi, Jonathan
Vinel
Narrated by:
Grace Seri
Editing by:
Jonathan Vinel
Animated by:
Saradibiza, Lucien Frampf
Music by:
Malibu
Produced by:
Oriane Hurard, Arnaud Counart, Pierre Zandrowicz
Production
company: Atlas V
Co-production
company: Arte France
Support
by: CNC, PROCIREP, ANGOA
