La chambre des magiciennes

Claude Miller, working this time in digital film, has made another superb study of a young woman under great pressure (mainly self-applied) who manages to work through her trauma. After the Charlotte Gainsbourg films of the 80's, and the wonderful L'Accompagnatrice with Romane Bohringer, he's looking at burnout in a thirty-year-old anthropology student who has a break down just days before the oral defence of her thesis. Claire is stubborn, sarcastic with everyone, and doubting her academic vocation.

In a hospital room with two other women, one of them a very disturbed elderly woman given to nocturnal wanderings that tie the staff in knots, she comes to understand something of herself, why she fights with her parents, why she's in a no-win relationship with a married man, why her studies of African myth and symbol are going nowhere. The digital camera in the cramped room is used very effectively to maintain a claustrophobic mood.