) borrows some key elements from the director’s own life. Like the girls in the film, her father was Corsican and died when she was very small; like them, she returned when she was 15, dreaming of making films as she knew her father had wanted to do. Unlike Corsini’s mother, however, Khedidja comes originally from West Africa.
Jessica is drawn to Gaia , the wayward older half-sister to Khedidja’s obstreperous little charges. Gaia is aimless, but she finds both passion and a project in Jessica who, unlike Gaia, has no rich parents to finance her future. Left alone by her big sister, Farah hangs out on to the beach and makes a combative frenemy in the local lad who runs the jet-ski concession.
This accuracy is undermined, however, by a longwindedness – the same points are reiterated in one truthfully rendered scene after another – together with a paradoxical tendency to dangle details that are never developed.