In the modern pantheon of movie protagonists who are simultaneously virtuous and vile, Shana (Eva Huault) is up there with the best of ‘em. She is what you might call a dyed-in-the-wool bridge burner, someone who will violently argue her case and make sure that her POV is heard while remaining blithely unaware of the fact that she’ll soon have to reap all the bad vibes that she has sewn.
Lila Pinnell’s spiky, confrontational film combines lengthy passages of shrill bandage with more reflective interludes, though it definitely leans more on the loud than it does the soft. As played by Eva Huault, in a barn-storming and wholly unselfconscious performance, Shauna bounds around Paris in ultra-revealing high-street threads, dealing a little bit of dope for her violent boyfriend (Sékouba Doucouré) while he’s serving a short sentence. The problem is, she’s allowing all her friends to pay what they have, and so the little biscuit tin she keeps her drug money in is filling up with IOUs.
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Though Shana plays like a standard procession of mishaps and misfortunes, Pinnell pointedly frames the story against the biblical trials of Moses, which in a variety of clever and symbolic ways all seem to happen to our heroine during her many toils. It’s all done as a bit of a camp joke, with the film’s opening credits comprising illustrated panels from a garish kids book, with scenes of crops being plagued by locusts or infected with hives.
For many the film will live or die on how much – if any – empathy you’re able to extend towards the monstrous Shana, who proves that you don’t have to be middle class to be an entitled princess. Yet those traces of empathy are there for those willing to search, in her capacity for intense female solidarity (with the right people) and the fact that she’s a Jew who is outraged by the atrocities in Gaza, perhaps the reason why she’s so uninterested in the pomp and ceremony of her step-sister’s Bat Mitsvah that is playing out in the backdrop. Formally it has the feel of an observational TV comedy, though there’s much more ambiguity to it than just witnessing a walking horrorshow get her just deserts.