Summer at the beach. Eighteen-year-old Esther is in love for the first time. On shaky terms with her family and with no immediate prospects, she decides to follow her summer love to his home in Paris—unannounced. Writer-director Anne Cazenave Cambet’s strikingly singular feature debut starts where many French films begin and end, creating an achingly sensitive portrait of a young woman simultaneously discovering her sexuality and heartbreak. With its revelatory performance by newcomer Tallulah Cassavetti as a guileless, open-hearted girl in a hypersexualized world, Gold for Dogs could leave it at that and still remain in our memories. But the movie takes an extraordinary left turn when Esther is left adrift in Paris and seeks shelter in a convent, entering an oasis of calm that entirely reconfigures the film’s form and atmosphere. In this silent, bright realm of women, captured with a documentarian’s eye for detail, ritual, and routine, Esther gradually comes to understand herself through her fascination for a beautiful novice who has taken a vow of silence. Described by its director as a reverse coming-of-age movie, Gold for Dogs is above all a brave and entirely successful experiment in breaking the mold of a classic French film formula.