Adolescence often presents itself as a suspended time, a parenthesis where everything is possible and yet nothing is guaranteed. Les immortelles settles into that uncertain territory to explore the friendship of two girls who believe themselves indestructible—until life surprises them with its harshness. Caroline Deruas Peano sketches an intimate portrait that speaks of shared dreams, the need to escape one’s place of origin, and, above all, the experience of losing someone before one has even learned how to live with the idea of death.

Charlotte and Liza, inseparable since childhood, live in a small town in the south of France in the early 1990s. Their days are filled with school routines, endless afternoons, and conversations that seem to have no end. But beyond the monotony, they are united by a vital project: moving to Paris and starting a band. The plan embodies everything they long for—freedom, intensity, and a future written by their own hands. It is the promise of a life larger than the one their parents seem resigned to accept.

Yet their relationship is not free from tensions. Charlotte, marked by the discomfort of a home where her father imposes a suffocating order and her mother seems resigned to her own frustration, invests in friendship the hope of a definitive escape. Liza, on the other hand, is swept away by doubts and distractions: a budding romance with a local boy, the weight of her family’s expectations, the creeping sense that perhaps the grand Parisian dream does not truly belong to her. This difference does not break their bond, but it shades it: while Charlotte clings to the dream with desperation, Liza seems to have one foot somewhere else.

The film’s title resonates with irony: The Immortals. At seventeen, the girls feel that nothing can separate them, that eternity belongs to them. And yet death arrives without warning. Liza falls ill, and her absence turns everything into an abyss. Lost, Charlotte faces the collapse of youthful certainties. What once seemed eternal proves fleeting; what once felt certain becomes fragile.

From that rupture, the story takes on a different tone. Reality blends with the oneiric: Charlotte imagines reunions, dreams of conversations that never took place, builds a space where friendship is still possible. The film invites us to consider that memory and imagination may be as valid a territory as the present. There, youthful promises remain alive, even if only as echoes.

Les immortelles thus becomes a reflection on adolescence as a time of emotional excess, when every gesture carries exaggerated weight and every loss feels irreparable. It is not simply about recounting a tragedy, but about capturing the intensity that defines the age of seventeen: the laughter shared in the schoolyard, the feeling that a single glance says everything, the certainty that with a friend by your side nothing is impossible.

What moves the viewer most is precisely the way the film balances the light with the painful. There are scenes that radiate tenderness, humor, and complicity, and others where life’s cruelty asserts itself with full force. In this oscillation, Caroline Deruas Peano conveys an essential idea: what makes people immortal is not the length of their lives, but the place they occupy in the memory of those who love them. Les immortelles is not just a story of loss, but also a tribute to friendship as refuge and as legacy. For when someone departs too soon, what remains are the traces of moments shared—those fragments of youth that become talismans against forgetting. And in that permanence, perhaps, lies a way of being immortal.