On CineAmerican dreams, Caroline and Jake unpack Claire Denis’ 1994 coming of age film, U.S. Go Home.

 

U.S. Go Home is a 1994 French film directed by Claire Denis. The film follows Martine and Marlene, two pretty fifteen year old girls, and Martine’s older brother, Alain, in a sleepy suburb outside of 1960s Paris on the night Martine vows to lose her virginity.  From this…unusual film premise your narrators, Jake and Caroline, will elaborate on how such a confusing film can manage to weave themes of adolescent sexual frustration and a coming of age arch in with anti-capitalist, american-imperialist sentiment. We will attempt to illuminate exactly how this impressive feat was done given that this one hour movie featured (by our conservative approximation) 2 million shots of trees and dancing teenagers. Indeed the ratio of manic dancing to actual dialogue was so impressive that we decided to deem it a mechanism by which the watcher is disoriented in time rather than our more uncultured first impression of “is Youtube broken?”. Be prepared for our commentary on how one soldier can be so aggressively American that even us, two Navy Midshipmen, found it “a bit much”.  Marvel at how we decipher what Denis really meant by the question “Would you like a coke?”. Cringe as we attempt to explain how a 3 minute slow dance between Martine and Alain was somehow more awkward than Alain and Marlene lying half-naked on a couch together. There will be ‘60s music, there will be French revolutions, and there will be more smoking teenagers than feels necessary. All this as Jake and Caroline, members of the United States Military, tell the U.S. to Go Home (we are going to be fired).

Links to Reviews by Caroline and Jake

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