Triet’s highly-charged frenzy of a debut feature sees a female news reporter navigate rowdy crowds and an even rowdier family row, as her persistent ex-husband attempts to pay her little children a visit on the day of the 2012 French Presidential Election.

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An impressive sequence marked by frantic energy and domestic chaos opens Justine Triet’s debut feature, Age of Panic.  As its title suggests, this is a highly-charged frenzy of a family drama about a divorced mother whose ex-husband attempts to pay her little children a visit at her apartment, and not just on any good old day but on the day of the 2012 French Presidential Election (!) 

The problem is that Laetitia, the perpetually flustered-looking mom, is also a news reporter.  So professional duty entails and she must navigate the rowdy crowds of the Parisian streets to report on the events on this momentous day. 

Age of Panic is largely compelling and this is due to two main reasons.  One, the performances by Laetitia Dosch (playing her namesake character) and Vincent Macaigne (as the determined ex-husband, also named Vincent) are very natural and incredibly believable in their portrayal of relational stress. 

“All I can do is suck it up.”

There is so much shouting in Age of Panic that at some level, one can marvel at the verbal fireworks on display.  Others might find it an annoying piece of pretentious cinema though, but on this rowdy day with rowdy crowds and an even rowdier family row, Triet hopes to conflate the personal with the political. 

It’s the day of Sarkozy vs. Hollande, ex-wife vs. ex-husband, and as the French title of the film precisely situates, it is La bataille de Solférino (The Battle of Solferino, a historical nod to Napoleon III’s fight against the Austrian army in the mid-1800s), but more specifically, a reference to Rue de Solférino, the HQ of the French Socialist Party that eventual winner Hollande was aligned with. 

The other reason is that by capturing her actors against the chaos of the streets, there is an exceptional sense of realism more attuned to the workings of documentary filmmaking. 

This fiction vs. non-fiction quality elevates what would have been a rather overbearing drama about domestic woes into something worth seeing and contemplating.  

Grade: B+

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