Not too well-known French filmmaker Laurent Lariviere made another modern French film with a bit of a new wave flair, and the main character of this mystery drama is Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert), a publisher who has just retired. And immediately in the opening scene, while driving in a car on a rainy night, she addresses the viewer directly and begins to tell her life story. And “About Joan” was one of those slightly retrospective films in which the characters in some mature years recall their lives, so Joan also recalls her youth, the events that formed her and marked her life. The narration here is not only non-linear, so we constantly jump from the present to the past, but it is necessary to distinguish what was reality and what was the fantasy of a woman who will be driven to introspection by a chance encounter with youthful love.
Joan (Freya Mayor in her youth) was a nanny in Ireland and there she fell passionately in love with petty thief Doug, but that romantic idyll was short-lived because they both ended up in prison very quickly. After a few years, Joan returned home to France with the son she had in a relationship with Doug without him even knowing, but a new shock will follow when her mother suddenly decides to leave them and goes to live in Japan with a karate coach. And there we keep jumping through time, we see that Joan (Huppert again) is now in a relationship with a younger German writer Tim (Lars Eidinger is one of the few actors whose theatricality, excessive expressiveness and overemphasis in acting I like and he always turns out to be excellent choice for eccentric characters), and suddenly her son Nathan (Swann Arlaud in adulthood) will return from Canada.
This film also hides some surprises, it is an unusual artistic drama in which Lariviere decided to mix numerous genres and styles, it remained somewhat sketchy and quite confusing to me. Although Huppert carries this entire story with his well-known charisma, the decision to constantly mix reality and surreality, reality and fantasy, as well as constant jumps through time, made the situation quite difficult for the viewer, and it remained quite problematic from a dramaturgical perspective.