In 1942, 19-year-old Irène is a young Jewish girl living in Paris. She has a passion for theatre and dreams of becoming an actress. Irène rehearses Marivaux's L'Épreuve to prepare for an entrance exam to the conservatory.
Françoise Widhoff as Marceline, Irène's grandmother
Florence Viala as Josiane, a neighbor
Ben Attal as Jo
Cyril Metzger as Jacques
Jean Chevalier as Gilbert
Production
In May 2017, Sandrine Kiberlain revealed in an interview with Elle magazine that she would be preparing her first feature film and that it was to be a long-term project, which would require a lot of time and work.[3] In an interview with Gala magazine, Kiberlain called the film "extremely personal" and explained, "I had the story in me for ten years, and it took me a long year to write it, alone."[4]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 82% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10.[11] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100, based on 7 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[12]A Radiant Girl received an average rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars on the French website AlloCiné, based on 28 reviews.[13]
Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily praised the "highly appealing effusiveness" of Marder's performance but criticized Kiberlain's stylistic choices and the film's "heavy-handed" conclusion: "A Radiant Girl is highly theatrical [...] in its emphasis on the nature of stage performance – which often gets the film bogged down in backstage discussion of a sort that can too easily feel alienating to film audiences. This only adds to the awkwardness of a film that - especially in its treatment of one of the gravest topics in modern French history - ultimately feels as callow as its heroine."[14]
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