Sandrine Kiberlain

(On TV, January 2021) The relationship between France and Quebec is a special one indeed, with the French-Canadian province often being portrayed Europe-side as an American escape for characters unable to tolerate the stifling embrace of the old continent. (Or, perhaps more accurately, French-Canadian characters being wilder than their European counterparts.)  French/Canadian co-production Romaine par moins 30 takes off from this premise, as a French couple flies to Montréal right in the middle of winter (!) and an incident aboard the plane leaves our heroine Romaine stranded at Dorval airport by minus 30 Celsius degrees, newly single and without money or identity papers. The precipitating incident is dubiously justified, which portends a film closer to a kind of fantasy than any attempt at realism. Our heroine (played by the very cute Sandrine Kiberlain) spends the film meeting eccentric characters, gets married against her will, makes her way to an isolated village that every Montréaler unexplainably knows and eventually grows out of her own limitations thanks to the power of a frigid winter, a tax-dodging acupuncturist, a few Québécois lovers and the orgasmic power of kneading dough—but I’ve said too much. The tone of Romaine par moins 30 is both its single biggest asset and its most vexing component: While the film manages to keep viewers intrigued by a stream of unlikely encounters, strange characters, wild plot tangents and offbeat sequences, the feeling of the film seems more haphazard than deliberate. There’s a lack of control that carries through to the ending, which ends abruptly without a satisfying coda. It clearly feels as if Quebec is presented as a fairyland of lusty lads and self-discovery opportunities to the European public—which isn’t a bad thing to be presented as, certainly, but the exoticism will feel strange to Canadian audiences.