Solène Rigot has a face that reads younger than she is and a manner that gives almost nothing away, and the interesting directors have used the second rather than the first. On the evidence so far, she is best when she has something to hide.
Fi1m perspective
In Tonnerre (2014), Vincent Macaigne's failed musician wakes up grinning after a first night with Solène Rigot's Mélodie, and she is already looking at the door. That shot is the performance. Rigot plays her cool where he is warm and guarded where he is helpless, and she never tells us whether the girl is bored, frightened or simply young. Guillaume Brac built his first feature around that gap, and Rigot keeps it open for as long as he needs it.
She came to the screen young, spotted at circus school, and the first parts in 2011 were the kind a childlike face attracts: Mathilde in 17 Girls, one of a group of pregnant schoolgirls. Puppylove (2013) gave her a lead, as Diane, a teenager finding out about sex, and Lulu femme nue (2013) a second role, Morgane, in a part noticed for its difficulty rather than its size. Tonnerre was the turn towards adults with secrets. Since then she has worked twice each with Sólveig Anspach, Arnaud des Pallières and Benoît Delépine, shared the central woman of Orpheline (2016) with Adèle Haenel and Adèle Exarchopoulos, each taking a different age, and appeared as Élise in Shepherds (2024). She also makes music, under the name Mr. Crock.
What she does well, on what we have seen, is hold her ground next to someone with more lines. In Tonnerre Macaigne is a large, wounded, talkative presence and Rigot gives him nothing to push against, which is why he keeps falling over. We liked the two of them together and did not believe in them for a second, and we came round to the view that the disbelief was Brac's point: a romance the audience can see through before the man can. Rigot has said that she learned from Macaigne "juste en l'observant jouer", and it shows; she watches him the way we do.
The reservation is the obvious one. For several years she was cast as girls, and those parts asked for a face more than a performance. Tonnerre is where the face stops being the job, and her later work in shared and second roles suggests directors have gone on trusting her with the harder half of a scene. We have not seen enough of it to say how far that goes.
Start with Tonnerre, and watch the morning after. Count how little she gives away, and then notice that you still want to know what she is thinking.
Biography
Solène Rigot is a French actress and musician. Born in 1992 in Paris, she grew up in the suburb of Rosny-sous-Bois and took music lessons from childhood, also training in circus arts. She made her screen debut in La Permission de minuit (2010).
Her early roles include Mathilde in 17 Girls (2011) and Madeleine in Renoir (2012). She played the lead in the Belgian film Puppylove (2013) and appeared as Mélodie in Tonnerre (2014). Subsequent credits include Lulu in the Nude (2013), Saint Amour (2016), Orphan (2017) and Shepherds (2024) as Élise.
Rigot is a member of the French musical group Mr. Crock, in which she plays accordion and synthesiser. She has also appeared in the music video for Beck's "Up All Night".
