Strong Shoulders (2003, Ursula Meier) (Patreon)

73/100

Third viewing, last seen at ND/NF 2004. This might be the most obscure of my favorite 21st-century films—currently has all of 33 views on Letterboxd, and unless someone moves quickly the review you're currently reading will be the very first one to be posted there. I had to download German subtitles and machine-translate them into English, which is obviously not ideal (but worked okay once I remembered that this process always wreaks havoc with pronouns for some reason). Meier subsequently made a tiny fest-and-arthouse-circuit splash with Home (#4 on my 2008 top 10 list; currently streaming in the Criterion Channel's Huppert retro) and Sister, so I'm not sure why her narrative debut has been consigned to oblivion. Here's what I wrote 18 years ago:

Bracingly astringent treatment of potentially cornball material, given extra heft by Louise Szpindel's ferocious, singleminded turn as track and field's very own Rosetta. (Szpindel even shares Dequenne's disarming visage, equal parts chipmunk and fox.) Flirts with convention but rarely follows through—one scene I initially thought trite wound up revealing alarming new depths to the protagonist's well of opportunism. Begins sharply in medias res, gradually accumulates emotional force, ultimately pulls off an optimistic, perversely triumphant ending that feels fully earned. Minor supporting characters (especially the girl's mom, played by Anne Coesens) make an indelible impression. Solid, intelligent, affecting, quietly wonderful. Pity about it looking like ass, though. 

Ah, digital video ca. the early aughts. (Much more tolerable watching this on my iMac than seeing it projected huge at the Walter Reade.) "Solid" and "quietly wonderful" seem slightly at odds, so just ignore the first adjective—this remains terrific stuff, and I'm quite surprised that Szpindel, who's worked pretty steadily since (she was in Lodge Kerrigan's never-seen-again-post-Cannes Rebecca H., as well as Doillon's Love Battles), failed to achieve a Dequenne-level profile. Self-destructive obsession is easy to overplay, and she nails the tricky balance between singleminded and solipsistic; you understand why Sabine alienates all of her friends, but you also understand why those friends don't hold a grudge once she relaxes a little. (Meier employs the high-jumper friend as counterpoint, which somehow works beautifully even though that character's solo scenes occupy an odd space that's not quite developed enough to qualify as a subplot.) And while Strong Shoulders isn't primarily a mother-daughter story, this is nonetheless among the more affecting examples I've encountered, from Mom embarrassing Sabine by playfully imitating her training exercises and starting crouch in the middle of a mall ("Is it these two fingers?") to the lovely moment in which she comes upon Sabine in the middle of the night, sitting inches from the TV and whispering insults at herself running in illicitly-shot* video footage ("Accelerate! Your arms, dammit! You really suck"), and counterintuitively smiles at her when their eyes meet. It takes a confident filmmaker to place trust in the viewer that we'll understand what Mom understands: that Sabine doesn't need comforting or encouragement right then, just...well, understanding. It's a tiny thing that's never addressed again in any way, but subtly incisive enough to impart seismic force. I really hope this sucker escapes from Movie Jail someday.

* "Illicitly" in the sense that this school's athletes are forbidden from videotaping themselves at practice, I guess precisely to stop them from obsessing over the footage like Sabine does. This is never stated in dialogue, but the cameras are always hidden in clothing with holes cut in it or carefully placed gym bags.