Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994)
★★★ — Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994)
Chantal Akerman made this sixty-minute film for the French television strand La Sept-Arte as part of a series commissioned around the theme of adolescence, and it sits comfortably alongside the more personal corners of her filmography rather than the formally austere work (Jeanne Dielman, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna) that had already secured her reputation. By 1994 Akerman was in her mid-forties, looking back at Brussels in 1968, the year of widespread student unrest across Europe, and the film draws on something close to autobiographical memory. Shot on a modest television budget with a largely unknown cast, it gave a rare early screen role to Julien Rassam, son of the producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, shortly before his early death in 1999. The result is a quietly semi-personal piece, produced cheaply but with complete artistic control.
A Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994) is a quietly luminous gem of European indie cinema, slight in runtime but rich in mood, nuance, and emotional honesty. Directed by Chantal Akerman, this short film follows a teenage girl over the course of an afternoon as she wanders Brussels, meets a boy, talks, flirts, reflects, and drifts through the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. There’s no grand plot, no dramatic climax, just two young people sharing thoughts, silences, and the kind of open-ended conversation that feels both ordinary and profound. What struck me most was its naturalism. The dialogue never feels scripted; the pacing never rushed. It captures that specific, dreamy inertia of youth, the sense that a single afternoon can contain entire lifetimes of feeling. In many ways, it reminded me of Before SSunrie, but stripped of romantic idealism and American pretentiousness. Here, the connection is more tentative, the setting more grounded, the emotions less performative. It’s Before Sunrise with less pretense and more authenticity. It's not flashy, not loud, not plot-driven. But it’s observant, tender, and disarmingly real. A small film that lingers far longer than its 60 minutes suggest. For anyone who’s ever walked and talked with someone new, hoping the conversation wouldn’t end, this will feel like a memory you didn’t know you had.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1994 | Watched: 2026-03-08
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