Bitten

Summary

Set in 1967 during the revelry of Mardi Gras, Bitten follows Françoise, a 17-year-old student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school who becomes convinced that she has only one night left to live. Rather than spend her final hours under the watchful eyes of the nuns, she slips out with her friend Delphine and heads into the city, where a costume party offers the chance to experience everything she believes she is about to lose. Françoise is the film’s restless, imaginative center: frightened by the prospect of death but equally afraid of reaching adulthood without ever having truly lived. Delphine serves as her closest companion and counterpoint, joining her escape while bringing a more grounded perspective to Françoise’s increasingly urgent behavior. Around them, the boarding school’s rigid religious environment represents the authority, shame, and repression that have shaped the girls’ lives. The party, by contrast, opens a nocturnal world of masks, music, flirtation, and possibility, where identities can be tried on and rules temporarily abandoned. Without reducing Françoise’s fears to a simple teenage whim, Bitten uses her conviction of impending death to explore the intensity of adolescent emotion. The film is concerned with the desire to break free from institutions and expectations, as well as with the complicated relationship between faith, superstition, and the need to find meaning in an uncertain world. Its Mardi Gras setting reinforces those ideas: behind costumes and rituals, the characters can challenge the identities imposed on them, even if only for a few hours. At its heart, Bitten is a coming-of-age story about friendship, female desire, rebellion, and the hunger to seize control of one’s own story. Its tension comes not only from wondering whether Françoise’s belief is justified, but from watching how that belief transforms an ordinary night into an emotionally charged passage toward adulthood.