If you were to imagine Lena Dunham making her twenties just a bit messier in “Tiny Furniture” by dabbling in drug dealing, you have a good idea of Lina Pinell’s amusing solo debut feature “Shana,” building upon her 2021 short “Le Roi David” about a cash-strapped young woman who looks for room for improvement in all the wrong places as she stumbles around France. No doubt Pinell didn’t want to waste an opportunity to extend the collaboration with Eva Huault, a force of nature who plays the titular character as if she’s a wrecking ball that most likely is doing damage to herself with her impulsive mood swings and lack of a firm direction.
Although she appears to have plenty of free time, relaxing doesn’t come easily to Shana, who finds herself in fierce argument no matter where she goes, introduced at a game night with friends where even with the hookahs around, she explodes when she’s picked to be dead in the imaginary scenario everyone is participating in, and things are no less tense in a car ride in the morning with her grandmother Marie (Geneviève Krief) and mother Yolande (Noémie Lvovsky) when she has a different memory of their shared Jewish heritage than they do. (A subsequent Passover seder has her guzzling down the Manischewitz wine rather than drinking it as part of the set intervals of the religious ritual when she suspect her mother is complaining about her to her older brother Samuel). It appears that anything that there is to complain about she’s brought largely upon herself when she has a preoccupation with plastic surgery that she can hardly afford and she feels beholden to her boyfriend Moses, a low level drug dealer who is incarcerated though insists on keeping the business running and she seems to have no issue selling modest amounts of dime bags when she hits the clubs.
In spite of the ill-advised choices Shana makes – and her friend Inés (Inès Gherib) is around to dissuade her from pursuing her worst ideas, Pinell’s admiration for how she has been able to forge a life without compromise, particularly as she craves independence, is infectious, not ever censoring herself for the sake of others and making things work financially by dipping into the biscuit tin of loose cash kept at Moses’ place for her expenses to compliment the income she makes at a shawarma joint. However, those days are about to come to an end when she refuses to leave her grandmother’s funeral at Moses’ behest to do a drug deal and then has to worry upon his arrival home that he might be upset to find a few francs missing from the tin. Shana is nothing if not a survivor, but even if her own anxiety kicks in about how she’s going to come up with the cash to stay out of harm’s way, mostly involving a decision to part with a ring her grandmother left as an heirloom, Pinell keeps things relatively calm in recounting her exploits, showing a dry sense of humor as the number of ways Shana can even think of to make money seem to reflect a generation with less possibility than their parents and all the more restless as a result.
Huault’s indefatigable spirit proves winning, which is enough to carry the lightly comic character study where even at the most desperate of times, there’s little doubt Shana will pull through. However, with the film’s early chaotic scenes even in the most sedate of milieus settling into something more stable with Shana refusing to lower her arms, Pinell sharply observes a survival of the fittest mentality that can look somewhat savvy when attention has currency – her low-cut tops are intended to make her the center of things everywhere – but she can be seen as her own worst enemy at times, ending up squabbling only with herself. Periodic interstitials of a storybook about the 10 plagues on Egypt connected to the film’s early Passover seder may cheekily place her mounting misfortunes in a historical context, but “Shana” will likely be looked back on fondly in capturing a time both in life and a current cultural moment where it’s up to the young to give themselves a fighting chance and its heroine keeps punching.
“Shana” will screen again at Cannes as part of Directors Fortnight on May 16th at 9:15 pm at the Théâtre Croisette, May 17th at 11 am at Cinéma Le Raimu and 11:30 am at Cinéma Les Arcades/Salle 1, 2 pm at Cinéma Alexandre III and 5 pm at Cinéma Studio 13.