Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jasmin Gordon
Starring: Ophelia Kolb, Paul Besnier, Arthur Devaux, Jasmine Kalisz Saurer
"To be courageous is to be free."
So reads a line from the self-help manual that Jule (Ophelia Kolb) uses to psych herself up before committing the most serious of several crimes she engages in over the course of writer/director Jasmin Gordon's Swiss-set feature debut. But Jule has confused courage with recklessness. A struggling single mother with three kids who all appear to be the products of different absent fathers, Jule doesn't have the courage to admit she's on her knees. She's convinced herself (like so many have in this post-pandemic era of manipulative charlatans who encourage mistrust of experts and authority) that she knows best. Rather than playing the system, as frustrating as it may be, Jule believes she can game it. Over a brief 80 minutes we watch as she makes one terrible decision after another in the belief that she's doing what's best for her kids.
The first of Jule's mishaps comes in the opening scene as she leaves her kids in a roadside diner before disappearing for hours. When the diner owner calls security, the kids flee, crossing a dangerous highway before walking miles to the home they don't realise they're soon to be evicted from thanks to their mother's failure to keep up with the rent. When Jule eventually shows up late at night, she spins them a story about being wrongfully accused of shoplifting. The evidence points to Jule lying through her teeth, most of all her ankle tag, which she has told her kids is due to an injury.
Jule regularly leaves her children alone, blaming car trouble. Their school principal has grown suspicious, suspecting Jule of engaging in prostitution, something the film never confirms nor denies. Jule has her eye on a house for sale, and having memorised the access code for its key, she even brings her kids to the home, telling them she's already purchased it, which results in a hurried escape when the estate agent shows up. An attempt to acquire financial aid from social services backfires when Jule loses her temper and storms out. Desperate, Jule concocts a plan to steal money from her former employer.
The Courageous becomes a unique heist movie, one in which we don't want the heist to succeed because we know it will ultimately make things far worse for Jule and more so for her children. Though relatively small in scale, the robbery has all the tension of Rififi. Jule is clever enough to figure out how to pull it off, but not nearly smart enough to consider the inevitable consequences. Our nails dig into our arm rests as we silently shout at the screen for her to abandon her desperate plan.
There's a ticking clock tension throughout The Courageous. From the opening it becomes worrying clear that we're probably witnessing the last few days of Jule's freedom. Her small town is filled with the smoking remnants of the many bridges she's burned, and as an attractive blonde white woman, we suspect she's been given more than one second chance. But by this point she's used up any understanding the liberal society of Switzerland might have initially had for her predicament. She's in a downward spiral, a woman circling the drain for 80 minutes as she tries to keep her head above the stinking water.
Like the recent similarly themed British drama Lollipop, The Courageous dares to present us with a protagonist whose situation creates empathy but who is so abrasively misguided that we struggle to approve of how she (mis)handles her predicament. Jule is a complex figure, and the lack of background information forces us to make our own assessment of how she ended up in this mess. She's simultaneously a victim and a villain, the sort of woman who gets herself labelled a Karen after being filmed having a public meltdown, but we suspect she's been through a hell we wouldn't wish on anyone.
With Jule constantly gazing into the woods that border her town, there's a sense that she would like to disappear from the modern world like Ben Foster's troubled army vet in Leave No Trace. A recurring image is of Jule being momentarily stunned by the flashing camera of the speed trap that catches her out every day. Later we see her kids, aided by a burly man with a sledgehammer, trash the same camera, but that Jule repeatedly gets caught by its accusatory glare is a clear distillation of her inability to slow down and play by the rules, even when she has children onboard.
The Courageous is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 5th.
