Aimless Youth: Part I

TU DORS NICOLE (A-minus) - You could say that Nicole is sleepwalking through a lazy Quebec summer, except she's having so much trouble falling asleep.

In one of the opening scene, Post-grad Nicole (Julianne Cote) and her friend Veronique (Catherine St.-Laurent) end up lost in a field while walking their bicycles. It turns out that each one thought the other was leading the way. That's how they'll meander all summer. Nicole has been left alone while her parents travel, and Veronique keeps her company. She's generally having a frustrating go of it (shorthanded nicely by a running gag in which Nicole struggles with her bike lock).

Director Stephane Lafleur, who wrote the script from a story by his regular collaborator Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne, shoots in dim black-and-white, a deadpan style that brings to mind the inertia of "Stranger Than Paradise" or "The Myth of the American Sleepover."  Nicole, who has a rather plain look, opens the movie by clumsily exiting the bed of a faceless casual date to head home at dawn. Veronique is blond and cuter, and tension grows between the pals when Nicole's brother, Remi (Marc-Andre Grondin) (10 years older) shows up and plants himself in the house with his two bandmates. This offers opportunities to flirt.

Remi is a moody one, overly demanding with his drummer(s) and bass player, never satisfied with their sound. (At one point, each musician plays in different rooms/floors of the house while recording.) The noise and the tension could be said to be disruptive to Nicole, but there's really nothing to disrupt (besides her friendship). The boys crank out a bunch of '90s-era drone, that mimics Pavement or Sebadoh. (The soundtrack is credited to Remy Nadeau Aubin.)

This all plays out in such a low-key manner that you wonder whether everyone, including the director, might be stoned -- or maybe you are. A surreal twist is added with the character of Martine (Godefroy Reding), a pipsqueak of about 12 whose voice has changed to such an extreme register that his voice is dubbed by an adult (Alexis Lefebvre). Martine crushes heavily on Nicole, who has served as his baby-sitter, and he has not only the tenor but the wisdom of a much older man, dropping philosophical bon mots into their conversations and vowing to wait for her to come around. Lafleur plays it half straight with Martine; and that represents the spirit of the film overall -- a balance of serious and screwball.

Lafleur and Beaugrand-Champagne have also suffused the film with subtext, but they wisely choose to stuff it deep below the surface. There is a family history that goes unexplored, and Nicole and Remi deal with their issues on separate tracks -- until a quite touching climactic scene that brings them together.

Until that point, "Tu Dors Nicole" is content to amble from vignette to vignette, a glorious encapsulation of the waning days of summer, which was the perfect time to view it.

BONUS TRACKS
A pair from Sebadoh's "Bakesale," just because. "License to Confuse" and "Rebound":