The less said about “Lost Girl,” the better. Produced as an MFA thesis project, this amateurish short feature presents the soggy story of the unlikely relationship between two maladjusted teenagers: a African-American loner (referred to in the credits, incredibly, as “Boy”) who shoplifts sleeping pills and pulls out his own teeth, and a nasty French girl who smokes cigarettes and sulks endlessly over her family’s relocation from Paris to an unidentified town in the U.S.
“Lost Girl” has all of the right ingredients for a wrong movie: actors who cannot act, a narrator with mumbling diction, murky monochrome camerawork, dull editing, and a story guaranteed to take your mind away from the non-action on screen. The press materials for the film insists “Lost Girl” is a fusion of the coming-of-age and film noir genres…though it actually seems more like a blown fuse.
There is one unintentionally hilarious scene which saves the film from total monotony: the surly French girl is sent to her room after using scatological English at the dinner table and begins bouncing on the bed while the soundtrack washes over with Maurice Chevalier singing in French. Of course, doesn’t every contemporary French teenager listen to Maurice Chevalier while turning their bed into a trampoline?
“Lost Girl” won the Best Debut Award and something called the Cineric Award for Excellence at last year’s New York Exposition of Short Film and Video. If this film could win an award, one can only shudder to think what the other films in that competition were like.
