I have to admit, I pretty much watched this without subtitles – my DVD player decided only a handful of lines needed translating, lol – so, armed with my creaky French, even though it’s mostly pre-adolescent girls talking or teachers talking to them (which you’d think would make it easier), it was maybe a slightly more confusing experience than necessary, and the last thing I expected this movie to be was confusing at all let alone because of the language barrier. Anyway, it’s in these situations when you actually notice a movie is, as is the case here, quite amazingly devoid of dialogue. One could sit for hours I’m sure dissecting what this movie “means”, what its images mean, etc – but really what it comes down to is the imagery, and when it comes to that, this one is really beyond compare.

I was struck immediately by the admittedly slightly obvious but perfectly effective opening of the violent noise, both visual and aural, that lies beneath an innocent looking stream … hmmm wonder what that means, huh? Follow that with a shot of five or six little girls gathering around a coffin from which another girl emerges, well, needless-to-say, I wasn’t gonna wait around for my subtitles. For its images and atmosphere alone, this is an instant favourite.

There’s one shot in particular of the girls playing randomly in the woods – some are swinging in trees, some skipping, some with hula-hoops, and the camera just drifts among them with such careless ease you’d be forgiven for thinking, as I’d say applies almost to the whole film, that you dreamt it. It reminded me of the way Picnic at Hanging Rock always appears in my memory.

Though I can’t say if it was merely to do with my missing the odd essential piece of dialogue, my attention did slip a little in the second half – I kinda wondered where the “lead”, the youngest girl, had got to during the whole theatre sequence. But it all came together in the end, and the final scene in the fountain is just shiver-inducingly striking. Literally, story aside, this is a beautiful, sad, strange experience worthy of anyone’s 2 hours. Do I need to warn that there are bare little girls’ chests and gasp a bottom or two in it? Probably. I have to admit, I had a lot of fun reading some of the IMDb comments for this one

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 5:20 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as cuties, French, nudity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.