The end of summer on a beach resort in Normandy. Louise, a retired grandmother, watches how the tourists leave the city, leaving it completely empty. When the last train leaves, Louise stays alone in her home. Autumn and Winter follow, so she spends her days walking around the beach or remembering her childhood, such as the episode when she was a teenager and her lover fled from a place when he saw a dead parachuter hanging on a tree. Louise meets a dog who becomes her companion. She sinks in the sea, but the dog saves her from drowning. The summer returns, and the tourists return, too, with the train. Louise again returns to her previous state, commenting on the nuisance of the tourists.
A quiet 'one-character character study', this animated film is an ambitious, but boring, sluggish and uneventful art-film. Quite simply, watching a grandmother wondering through an empty beach resort during winter for 75 minutes—with such highlights as sweeping her doorstep from sand, stumbling upon a scrapheap or watching the horizon across the sea without using marine binoculars—is not that engaging. When there are several characters in a film, there are good chances that at least some of them are going to end up interesting or fun, but when you have a film like "Louise by the Shore" where its story follows only one character, and she is uninteresting and doddering, then the whole concept does not work. There are traces of some more philosophical themes by director Jean-Francois Laguionie, such as aging, transiency and loneliness, yet they were not developed that much since the ending has no point: there is no conclusion that leads to somewhere, it is just a circle where everything returns back to square one. Some rare moments work, including a one where Louise "talks" to her dog, humorously mentioning how people now call her retired generation ("'Best agers', or 'Generation gold'"). This would have worked as a short, but not as a feature film, and not even surreal dream sequences manage to ignite some greater sympathy for this fable.
Grade:+
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