For at least half of her debut feature, French writer-director Eléonore Faucher seems to be emulating her countrywoman Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Anatomy Of Hell): Faucher's Sequins shares Breillat's chilly, confrontational forthrightness, her low-key intensity, and some of her love of female empowerment through uncomfortable eroticism. But Sequins ultimately heads into a standard mismatched-buddy drama that would nestle nicely into a Hallmark movie of the week. The starkness should add strength to the bland story, but Faucher frontloads all her punches, leaving herself nowhere to go but into the realm of sentiment and schmaltz.
Stunningly beautiful actress Lola Naymark debuts as a small-town supermarket cashier who winds up pregnant after her birth control fails; the father falls back on lines like "Are you sure it's mine?", and Naymark shrugs him aside and begins dealing with the issue on her own, mostly by alternately ignoring it and obsessing over it. Hiding her increasingly visible bulge from her prying coworkers and acquaintances, she confides in old friend Marie Felix, while secretly harboring a crush on Felix's brother Thomas Laroppe. Coincidentally, Laroppe is recovering from a motorcycle accident that killed a friend of his, and the friend's mother (Ariane Ascaride) happens to be a famous embroiderer, and embroidery happens to be Naymark's passion. After a frosty beginning, the two women find common cause both in their lonely abandonment and in their love of their art, which Faucher mostly expresses via swelling music and rapturous close-ups of elaborately sequined fabric.
That kind of focus on fragmentary detail sometimes serves Faucher well: When Naymark examines herself in a mirror, Faucher cuts between shots of her stricken face and her swollen, hairy belly, separating them as though they belonged to two different people, and in the process saying far more about Naymark's nauseous estrangement from her own body than a five-minute speech could. Juxtaposing meaningful looks and meaningful details lets Faucher get away with long silences and minimal dialogue, and her daring in sexualizing a hugely pregnant 17-year-old is noteworthy. But she can't avoid the obviousness of her sisterhood sob saga. Sequins is so slow and portentous that it sometimes feels like Faucher is deliberately lingering on pretty cloth and petty asides to avoid getting back to her hollow-cored story, which comes down to this: Women, even of different ages and nationalities, have mysterious and magical bonds. No wonder Faucher's characters don't talk much: They could have said that in the first five minutes of the movie, and then where would they be?