There is something almost mythical about the idea of the “French girl”. She has a certain je ne sais quoi. Entire magazines, Pinterest boards and beauty brands have spent years trying to explain how to become her, which is funny because the whole point is, supposedly, that you can’t. The French girl is less of a person than a concept, an image of femininity that fashion has constructed and then convinced us is somehow innate.

Hyun Lee’s French Girls is interested in precisely this kind of construction: how fashion manufactures images and just how easy it is to lose track of where the performance ends.

Mia (Mia Kidis) is not the obvious candidate for fashion-world ascension. When we first meet her, she is floating through life in Sydney, doing manual labour, dating a small-time scammer and spending an impressive amount of time doing, essentially, nothing. Then, modelling rather accidentally falls into her lap when she is approached by an agent and, suddenly, she forgoes her hi-vis jackets. There is a sadness behind her eyes even when very little appears to be happening on her face. She is permanently half-present, as though she is observing her own life at the same time as she is living it. And for an industry that is known for cutthroat competition and opportunities that can take years to materialise, Mia’s unique look immediately lands her big projects and cements her as the face of the “French girl”. 

However, the film is uninterested in pretending modelling is glamorous all the time. It shows how a remarkable amount of it is just waiting around. Waiting to be photographed, waiting to be told where to stand, waiting for somebody more important than you to make a decision. Lee, drawing from her own experience as a fashion photographer, understands modelling primarily as labour. 

And as Mia moves further into this world, the film brushes against a familiar problem: what happens when a woman’s ambition begins changing how the people around her see her? It reminded me a lot of The Devil Wears Prada, particularly in the strange moral suspicion directed towards women who begin succeeding in fashion. Andy gets the job, becomes good at it, gains access to a world she previously mocked and, somehow, her friends decide that she is the problem. Mia similarly finds herself caught between old friends who judge what she is becoming and new friends whose affection is considerably harder to trust. There is an interesting distinction here between critiquing consumerism and using that critique to punish a woman for enjoying success.

Perhaps, appropriately, the film itself refuses the polish of the world it depicts. Since it was made for just $28,000 and populated largely by non-professional actors, French Girls has the unmistakable charm of an amateur production where the seams are part of the appeal. Sydney feels unusually tangible here, with areas like Central and the Inner West feeling inhabited, messy and recognisable. 

That DIY quality also suits the dialogue, which is loose, playful and more interested in following a young woman through a particular moment in her life than forcing her into an easily digestible moral lesson. Mia makes bad decisions, people around her behave strangely, things happen almost incidentally until, somehow, she becomes infamous.

In a year where films like Obsession have already shown just how far a small budget can stretch, French Girls is another reason to keep betting on local filmmakers.