23/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Prïncia Car’s debut feature is an ambitious but muddled coming-of-age tale

Premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Prïncia Car’s debut feature, The Girls We Want [+see also:
interview: Prïncia Car
film profile], sets out to explore the emotional turbulence and social dynamics of adolescence, but ultimately finds itself lost in a haze of familiar tropes and undercooked narrative strands. Set against the sun-drenched backdrop of Marseille’s outer districts, the film follows Omar (Housam Mohamed), a 20-year-old youth worker who oversees a community centre alongside his childhood friends. The arrival of the enigmatic Carmen (Lou Anna Hamon), a returning presence from Omar’s past who left Marseille and ended up working as a prostitute for years, disrupts the group’s established order and triggers a crisis of identity and desire among the teens.

On the surface, Car’s second feature has some good ingredients for a compelling coming-of-age drama: real locations, a diverse ensemble cast, and a story potentially charged with emotional and sexual discovery. However, the final product feels muddled, weighed down by a screenplay that favours naive resolutions and patchy characterisation over emotional clarity or narrative coherence.

A key point of contention lies in the misleading title. One might expect Carmen and Yasmine (Leïa Haïchour) to take centre stage, but for more than two-thirds of the film, the narrative revolves almost exclusively around Omar. Carmen’s sudden re-emergence in the final act shifts the focus jarringly, leading to a hasty romantic arc that feels artificially resolved. Their relationship, which is presumably meant to anchor the film’s thematic core, is sketched so ambiguously that its dramatic weight never lands. The climactic moment between them plays as overly theatrical, leaving the impression of a narrative devised by committee – co-written as it is by Car and Léna Mardi – and tinkered with to the point of incoherence.

The supporting characters are drawn in even broader strokes, functioning less as rounded individuals and more as archetypes in a microcosm of adolescent masculinity. At times, their interactions feel like exercises in theatre improvisation – unfocused and overly reliant on clichés, such as group sex talk and sudden emotional outbursts. While these elements are not without relevance in a coming-of-age context, their deployment here adds little to the development of the pic’s central concerns.

Technically, The Girls We Want adopts a vast amount of hand-held camerawork and a profusion of close-ups meant to suggest a documentary-like intimacy. While Raphaël Vandenbussche’s bright, sun-bleached cinematography captures the textures of Marseille’s neglected outskirts with verisimilitude, the stylistic choices feel more dutiful than inspired. There’s a sense that the film wants to signal authenticity without fully committing to the narrative depth that such a tone demands.

All in all, The Girls We Want feels like an incomplete character study masquerading as a fully fledged feature. The film gestures at ideas around gender roles, sexuality, masturbation and peer conformity, but leaves too much unsaid and too many relationships underwritten. One can see promise in Car’s direction – particularly in her willingness to tackle difficult social themes – but little in this film pushes the conversation forwards.

And so, what does this add to the already crowded field of European coming-of-age cinema? With its tentative execution, The Girls We Want struggles to justify its place. Ultimately, it’s a film that generates expectations that it cannot meet.

The Girls We Want was produced by France’s After Hours Production in co-production with France 3 Cinéma and Zinc. SND is handling its worldwide sales.