While the scene recalls Vivre Sa Vie for its combination of a single woman’s romantic inclinations intermingled with innocuous record-store chatter, the film fails to charge the proceedings beyond connecting the dots between Victoria’s life events. Victoria pursues him, transparently offering CDs recommendations in hopes he’ll ask her out. Once grown, Victoria tries her hand at odd jobs, including a clerk in a record shop, in which she spots Thomas, who she last saw as a young boy in the Savinet home. As such, it becomes a requisite rather than exploratory narrative element.
The explications are so leaden that one might be tempted to read Fanny as an unreliable narrator, banally detailing Victoria’s plight when it clearly runs much deeper, but Civeyrac consistently uses her voiceover to flesh out Victoria’s psychology. But rather than explore childhood desire or the ways a search for belonging can drive children to take potentially dangerous risks, Civeyrac gives all insights to Fanny, who explains Victoria’s joys and frustrations in straightforward terms, leaving little room for ambiguity. After a clunky bit of exposition revealing Fanny as our narrator, the film jumps nearly two decades into the past as Victoria, as an eight-year-old orphan, is taken in by the Savinet family, whose bourgeois home Victoria becomes quickly obsessed with. The story opens with Victoria and her friend, Fanny (Nadia Moussa), accompanying a pair of children through a Parisian park. Instead, My Friend Victoria lurches forward with all of the hokey sincerity that its un-ironic title suggests, barely maintaining a pulse as expected dramaturgical conflicts regarding both parenting and generational divide are explicitly, if dutifully, addressed.
Were Civeyrac out to recast the terms of Sembène’s tragedy in relation to contemporary French race relations, the scene could be a nod to its forebear and a starting point for broaching further, carefully considered terrain. Even as potentially subtle critiques emerge, like when Victoria (Guslagie Malanga), a black French woman, spots a piece of African art hanging on the bathroom wall of white hook-up Thomas’s (Pierre Andrau) home, it’s a moment lifted from another film-Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl-made over 50 years ago. Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s My Friend Victoria, an unremarkable adaptation of the short story Victoria and the Staveneys by Doris Lessing, disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.
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