Head to Head: The Lila Gueneau Revelation (review)
The actress bursts onto the screen as a teenager who became pregnant following a rape in a first film set against the backdrop of the Second World War of remarkable complexity and delicacy.
To tackle a problem head on is to take care of it seriously, to look into it closely. The expression refers to a double effort, to a physical as well as intellectual involvement, to something of a collision of the material and the immaterial. In her first feature film, it is the meeting of socio-religious dogmas and the female body that Marie-Elsa Sgualdo chooses to tell. In 1943, fifteen-year-old Emma is about to receive the Virtue Prize from her village in the Swiss Jura, which could help her finance her nursing studies. It was before her rape by a passing journalist, before the resulting pregnancy, before her destiny slipped through her fingers.
The young filmmaker offers a film in the form of a beautiful escape, whose staging, the settings – which initially reflect, muffled, taciturn, the sobriety and all-Protestant submission of the young girl and her peers – mature and evolve as her personal revolution progresses. Emma takes flesh before our eyes in a coming-of-age story carried by Lila Gueneau who, with large dark eyes straight out of a master’s painting – and already seen in Eat the Night (2024) and the more recent Femme de (2026) – signs an extraordinary performance of restraint.
She shares the bill with Grégoire Colin as a pastor drowning in alcohol the guilt of Swiss neutrality, Aurélien Patouillard as the head of the family whose ego has never recovered from the departure of his wife with another, Cyril Metzger as a fascinatingly casual aggressor and Thomas Doret as a husband-adolescent supporter of the norm. So many male figures to whom the author-director gives the gift of nuance, intelligently avoiding the pitfall of Manichaeism.
Of Marie-Elsa Sgualdo. With Lila Gueneau, Sandrine Blancke, Thomas Doret… Duration: 1h36. Released May 27, 2026
