While she has only directed three films, each one of the works constructed by Katell Quillévéré feels like complex, vibrant glimpses into the collective consciousness, a daring and provocative series of images, each one coming together to tell moving and poignant stories. She is truly one of our most fascinating young talents, and an absolutely essential voice in contemporary cinema, which has massively benefited from her presence, since she has the dedication and thoughtfulness of many tremendous artists that inspired her work, and gave her the opportunity to make her films, whether directly or through simply influencing her to become a storyteller. This is all made extraordinarily clear in Love Like Poison (French: ), her feature-length directorial debut, and the work that initially launched her career and gave her the necessary start in an industry that continues to seek out these exciting new voices, which Quillévéré has certainly used to her advantage, making only a few films, but where each one is close to perfect, the kind of extraordinarily complex and intricately-woven exploration of deep themes, placed in stark contrast with absolutely gorgeous visual landscapes, which makes for truly rich, vibrant filmmaking from a director with a clear passion for the medium. Love Like Poison signalled the start of a very promising career, and even in isolation from the rest of the director’s work, it remains a beautifully rich and evocative tale of adolescence that may not be overly original in theory, but achieves a level of nuance through sheer ambition.

One of the common themes that run through all of her films is that of the coming-of-age narrative – each one of the director’s stories features characters who tend to be quite young, being launched into the throes of adulthood as a result of unavoidable circumstances that leave them absolutely shattered, causing them to find a way to survive, whether literally or metaphorically. Added onto this is that each one of them looks at femininity in some way, particularly in comparison to the modern world, and how women find themselves on differing sides of the gender divide that is unfortunately socially mediated. In this regard, Love Like Poison is the first in a loose trilogy of films, with Suzanne and Heal the Living looking at similar themes, just focusing on older characters, uniting the trio of films as a singular progressive entity that explores similar material, just from a range of different perspectives. Here we are looking at a young girl, caught at the difficult stage between the final years of childhood, and the beginning of adulthood – the entire film uses religion as a major motif, propelling the film as both a device to establish the milieu amongst the pastoral French countryside, and as a means to draw correlations between the young woman’s undying faith and her complex journey to adulthood (which is evident in the film orbiting around her upcoming confirmation, a rite of passage that signals a young Catholic has been consolidated into the faith), which are beautifully sewn together into the fabric of this absolutely stunning work of fiction.

Love Like Poison is primarily a social realist text, with the director making use of many captivating ideas in her endeavour to create a work that is as descriptive of a particular time and place as it is invested in telling a complex story. Quillévéré has a strong directorial eye, and the film reflects her curiosities as both a visual stylist and narrative filmmaker, which allows the film to be quite profound in both regards. Social realism is not solely about presenting stark images without a conventional story structure, but rather establishing a method of looking at a particular faction of society (in this case the lives of working-class Catholics in the French countryside), and offering an authentic snapshot that is both profound and moving, while still offering the viewer a sufficient amount in terms of a strong story. Love Like Poison encapsulates all of this – it might not be the raw and unforgiving existential oasis that were defined by people like Robert Bresson, but it’s also not fully similar to the lush and flowery philosophical drama of Éric Rohmer. Instead, it is a combination of both, a beautifully poetic coming-of-age story that presents us with a very straightforward narrative, albeit one that is tinged with the kind of fantastical melodrama that gives it such a balanced atmosphere. It’s beautiful and well-composed in a way that we don’t often find when it comes to these social realist dramas, and Quillévéré makes exceptional use of all the resources available to her in the creation of this curiously charming coming-of-age narrative.

On the subject of both the coming-of-age narrative and social realism in general, a film can only be as good as its weakest performance – and mercifully, Love Like Poison is remarkable in terms of the entire ensemble. The film is led by Clara Augarde, a promising young actress who brings a lot of potential to a role that could have been far less effective in a performer that did not have a good insight into the character that she did. It’s not often we find such natural performances coming from actors of her age, and while it is a relatively subdued performance (which applies to nearly all of the performances in the film), there is a simmering passion beneath the surface that makes it so memorable. She’s a formidable protagonist, capable of commanding the screen all on her own, or sharing scenes with any of the equally gifted actors, which is impressive considering how many of them are veterans of the industry. Lio plays her mother, in the closest the film has to a character that embodies the more melodramatic side of the story, while Michel Galabru is astonishing in every one of his scenes, playing the rascal of a grandfather who is slowly dying, but who does his best to conceal it under layers of playfulness that make this a truly spellbinding performance from a brilliant actor who manages to find the nuance in nearly every situation. It’s a small but well-constructed cast that feels genuinely quite complex, especially when it comes to defining them as more than just thin archetypes.

Love Like Poison is the kind of film that exists somewhere between fiction and reality – we can certainly identify with the story and the characters that populate it, but it is also a very challenging work insofar as it shows a radically different side of such narratives. Coming-of-age stories tend to veer towards being more sweet, focusing on careful explorations of innocence, while this was is forthright in its attempts to show the process by which this innocence may not be lost outright, but instead gradually erodes as one learns more about the world and the many bizarre and peculiar challenges that underpin it. It’s a truly wonderful film that simmers with passion and complexity, which comes from a director with what appears to be a genuine fondness for this material, and the staggering talents to turn it into something truly unforgettable. Quillévéré may not be as well-known outside the arthouse as some of her contemporaries, but her raw talent and strong vision have come together on three separate occasions to create something entirely unforgettable and meaningful, which is why Love Like Poison, while still rough around the edges, is a wonderfully nuanced and deeply meaningful piece that challenges conventions and looks at the process of growing up in an active and engaging manner, and proves to be an essential work of contemporary French cinema, and a great film overall.