Louise By the Shore

Evoking MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY, ‘The Twilight Zone,’ and Post-Impressionist watercolors, this lovely, imaginative film by Jean-François Laguionie is an “animation for adults” only in the sense of its mature and reflective sensibility. On the last day of the summer season at a small seaside resort town, 75-year-old Louise misses the last train out. After a torrential downpour, she emerges from her room the next morning to find the streets flooded and the town utterly deserted. Days, weeks, months pass in this dreamlike interlude, as Louise, like a modern-day Crusoe, learns to fend for herself, her solitude interrupted only by a talking dog and by memories of the seaside episodes of her past.