Southern belle

The Belle in the title is Taelor Ranzau, 26, born in Houston Texas as the only child of a baseball champion turned businessman who made a fortune before dying when his daughter was only 15. For his first feature film, Nicolas Peduzzi does not just deliver a portrait of this “Belle”, a whimsical, restless and ultimately quite lost character: he immerses us into a crazy world where people hunt at night, wave threats around and tear each other apart – in short, pure upper-class “white trash”, where money only serves to fuel sad fantasies, impoverished imaginations and pathetic family drama. As the camera brings us incredibly close to people and situations, we find ourselves in theatrical territory, like the set of a vicious soap opera where the most tired clichés are pushed to their extreme. A portrait of a certain contemporary white America whose decline has reached unsuspected depths, right down to its last nervous endings. (JPR)