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Lucile Hadzihalilovic (France, 1961) debuted with
La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996), produced by Gaspar Noe'.
Innocence (2004), adapted from Frank Wedekind's novella "Mine-Haha" (1903), and photographed by Benoit Debie,
is a surrealistic fairy tale. The girls seem to inhabit
Jeunet's magic universe,
a universe in which people (or least women) are born in coffins, ready to be buried, and have to spend their youth learning a craft (like dancing) to pay the bills only to be then swallowed by the most mundane lifestyle.
The film opens with still images of an underground cistern, then still images
of a house, then the film proper begins with the close-up of a coffin.
Six little girls walk around the coffin.
We only see their legs.
One of them opens the coffin and reveals a naked Asian girl who opens her eyes.
They ask for her name. She says her name is Iris.
The six Caucasian girls dress the Asian girl in a white uniform like theirs.
They explain to Iris that each girl has her a ribbon in her hair that signifies
the relative age, with the youngest having the red ribbon and the oldest the
violet ribbon. Now Iris gets the red ribbon and the others exchange ribbons
according to their seniority.
Selma, the former red ribbon, gets angry that the former violet ribbon, Natacha, i.e. the former oldest girl, is missing, and storms out of the room.
The new violet ribbon is Bianca. She informs Iris that there are no boys
there. Iris asks "what is this place?" but we don't hear the reply.
Bianca takes Iris to a pond where a lot of girls are swimming and teaches
Iris how to swim. Iris meets another red-ribbon girl, another girl who just arrived, Laura, who says that she won't stay long. Bianca explains that there are three houses in the compound, each one with red ribbons and so on.
Over dinner Iris meets elderly maid Madeleine.
Iris is sorry to see that Bianca is leaving. Iris asks where she's going and she
replies that it's a secret but promises to return.
In the morning Bianca shows Iris the way through the forest to the school.
Iris meets the young teachers: the limping Edith who teaches science,
and Eva, who teaches dance.
Iris meets schoolmate Alice and asks her if she'll have to stay long and Alice replies "yes". Alice mentions a
headmistress who comes once a year to see the girls dance.
Bianca later clarifies that the visit is only for blue ribbons.
Iris asks if her brother could visit, but Bianca tells her that it's forbidden,
just like it's forbidden for them to leave the compound.
Every night Bianca disappears and refuses to tell Iris where she goes.
So one night Iris follows her secretly. This takes her to another building where
she witnesses a
man administering an injection to an elderly maid.
This is the first man we see in the film. Iris explores the house and then runs
through the forest back home, but gets lost. She is eventually found by the other girls who warn her that, if she tries to escape from the compound, she will become a maid, condemned to serve the girls for the rest of her life.
One day Selma, the former red ribbon, takes Iris to see the wall that surrounds
the compound and warns her that there are strange people outside.
She claims to know Bianca's secret, but then finds an excuse not to tell her.
Iris runs away and falls, and Selma beats her up instead of helping her, and then
tastes her blood. Dance teacher Eva tells Iris that
"obedience is the only path to happiness".
Laura wants to escape and steals a rowboat. Iris witnesses little Laura rowing away, but the boat has a hole and water soon causes it to sink.
Iris hear another story: that Edith was a girl who tried to run away and the headmistress punished her by breaking her leg.
At night Iris tells Bianca that Laura stole the boat. Later, Laura is found dead:
she drowned.
At night, Laura's coffin is burned on a pyre.
Alice, an older girl who is already a blue ribbon, hopes to be chosen by the headmistress: every year the headmistress chooses one blue-ribbon girl during a dance and takes her away.
After Alice confesses that she is longing to explore the outside world,
Edith prepares her that she will probably not be the chosen one.
Sur enough the headmistress chooses another girl
(after checking their hands and teeth).
Alice is traumatized: she lies in bed lifeless for days.
One day, she escapes the building, runs to the wall, climbs to the other side... and then we hear gunshots and barking dogs.
Edith informs the girls that Alice will never come back.
Bianca continues her mysterious night errands, but one night she brings with her the younger indigo-ribbon Nadja and tells the other girls that Nadja is allowed to: Nadja will soon replace Bianca.
Teachers Eva and Edith escort Bianca and Nadja (as well as four other girls from the other two buidings) through a secret passage behind
a pendulum clock. The girls are told to wear butterfly costumes.
It's theater. The curtains open and the girls are sent on stage.
The audience cannot be seen in the dark. The girls dance to the music.
We now understand that the years of dancing lessons are only meant to prepare
the girls for performing in front of that audience.
One day Eva tells
Bianca that it's the last night at the theater for her.
Eva also gives Bianca towels for the mestruations that will soon happen to her.
That night a man shouts "You are the most beautiful" and throws a rose to Bianca.
After the show, and after the audience has left,
Bianca and another girl sneak out and walk around the empty theater.
They are found by a maid who is counting money and reveals that the costs of the school are paid with those performances.
Iris heard that Bianca is leaving and is sad.
Bianca hands a key to Nadja, hugs the old maid and walks away.
Bianca and the other five violet ribbons are escorted again down the secret passage.
Eva collects their ribbons and then escort them past the theater
to a subway station, where they board a train with Eva. There are no other passengers.
The six girls carry no luggage, no money, no clothes, no food.
Meanwhile, at the school a new girl pops up from a coffin, welcomed by Iris and the other girls.
When the train stops, Eva and Edith deliver the six girls to another woman, who
escorts them out of the station and they finally see the outside world.
Bianca seems to fall in love right away with the first teenage boy she sees.
Her first film in eleven years, Evolution (2015), co-written with Alante Kavaite and photographed by Manuel Dacosse, is another cryptic story but this time the mood is closer to a nightmare than to a fairy tale. The film feels like
a companion to her debut: if that one had only little girls and adult women, this one only features little boys and adult women; if that one felt like a terrible mystery kept the girls captive, this one similarly feels like a terrible experiment keeps on these captive boys.
We find out what is going on little by little. Some important details are revealed only at the very end, and shed light on details that were shown briefly before.
It is almost at the end that we realize this is probably a horror scifi movie.
We are never told what the horror is and what the scifi is, but that's the
lingering feeling after the ending. It's the typical art film that
raises more questions than it answers.
The film is creepy without being gruesome.
The film opens with underwater vegetation. We see a child swimming, viewed from
the bottom of the sea. Nicolas runs home distraught and tells his mom that
he saw a dead boy at the bottom of the sea. The mother does not believe him.
He tells her that he saw a red starfish on the dead body.
Other children invite him to bury a crab.
Nicolas has to take a medicine because of an illness.
His mother dives as all the boys watch, and only finds the starfish.
She insists that she didn't see any dead body.
Nicolas dives again and looks for the dead body, but she dives behind him and
brings him back to the surface. He even injures his hand.
Later that night, his mother dives by herself and brings back the dead body.
At the light of lamps, several women gather silently around it.
The following day Nicolas is playing with the the children.
He gets into a fight with Frank who calls him a "coward" for not wanting to touch
the red starfish. Nicolas takes a stone and hits the starfish repeatedly.
His mother takes Nicolas to a hospital
where nurses administer an injection. He asks if he's going to die and the nurses
don't reply. A nurse browses through Nicolas' sketchbook of drawings, impressed
that he is drawing things that don't exist in the village
(which doesn't even have cars let alone a Ferris wheel) and he even knows the name of those objects (which the nurse herself may or may not know).
The nurses prepare the surgery table and inject anesthesia in his belly.
Nicolas wakes up in a ward with other boys like him, and they exchange feelings
about the incisions made on their bellies.
Four nurses watch videos of cesarean sections being performed on pregnant women.
The incision is similar to the one made on Nicolas.
Back home, Nicolas gets curious about his mother's night errands. He finds her
at the beach lying naked with the other mothers, humming and
slowly revolving in mud, like beasts having slow-motion sex, and they pass around an object.
Back home, Nicolas spies his mother from the
keyhole while she is taking a shower and notices that she has strange malformations
(like reversed suction cups)
on her back.
She senses that he's watching her.
Back at the hospital, the nurses check Nicolas' belly with an ultrasound device.
At one point they detect the heartbeat of a foetus and his mother smiles.
He is taken again in the ward with the other boys.
One of the boys is pessimistic that their health will ever improve.
Victor is the next one to be operated. The nurse puts in a jar whatever they
extracted from his belly and puts the jar in a room with many other similar jars.
Nicolas asks the nurse where is Victor and she doesn't reply (he is presumably dead).
A nurse brings the news that Victor has fully recovered and is sending them a
gift: a conch shell.
Nicolas' mother visits. Nicolas refuses to eat as if suspecting that he is being poisoned. He resists when his mother wants to check his sketchbook as if the
sketchbook reveals something dangerous about him (again, he draws things that he
should not know of if he's only lived in that isolated village).
He angrily tells her that she is not his mother.
He is strapped to a surgical table and taken into the surgical room again
and is injected a sedative.
When he wakes up, he is surrounded by the other children: they too think that
their mothers are not their real mothers.
Nicolas keeps drawing a woman, perhaps his real mother.
The nurses watch a disgusting video of a baby being extracted from the belly of a woman through a large incision.
One nurse, Stella, is fascinated by the boy. She says she wants to tell him
a secret and instead of "saying" it she shows him photographs of children
like him and
of women like her and her mother (with those malformations on their backs).
She takes him for a swim but then drags him underwater until he loses consciousness. We see that she has the suction protrusions on her back like her mother. She brings him back to shore and revives him with CPR. If she didn't want to kill him, then maybe it was some kind of test.
Nicholas wakes up at the hospital and wanders around. He finds a boy in a room,
lying on the bed.
The boy brings Nicolas's hand to his belly so that Nicolas can feel a heartbeat
in the belly. The boy then vomits black fluid and Nicolas runs away.
Nicolas then happens on a big water tank in which a lifeless boy is floating.
He is forced to undergo another surgery.
He then wakes up in the water tank. He is scared to notice two small creatures
underwater in the same tank. We see one of the babies surfacing and opening his eyes.
Next we see Nicolas by the sea with nurse Stella who is caressing him.
She takes him underwater but this time keeps her mouth pressed against him
so that he can breath from her. She seems to be able to stay underwater forever,
like a mermaid.
At dawn we see them on a rowboat that is drifting towards open sea.
Nicolas is lying down exhausted.
The camera shows where they came from and we realize that it's an island.
Stella dives into the sea and leave him alone on the boat.
He calls her in vain. In the middle of the night, Nicolas is woken up by the sounds of civilization and sees the skyline of a city.
We are left with the doubt of what this was all about. One can speculate that the film is set in a future in which women cannot give birth anymore and so the scientists have invented a method by which little boys can get pregnant, but at the price of dying young (hence no adult males). The boys are kidnapped to the island and subjected to the experiment. Nicolas remembers his past and we can see it in his drawings. His mother is simply his jailer. On the other hand, women seem to have supernatural powers underwater. It is only at the end that we fully realize we haven't seen anyone else; and no cars, no airplanes, no shops, no TV sets, no phones... no signs of civilization. And it's only a brief image towards the end that tells us that the story took place on an island, far away from civilization. What happened to "civilization" we are never told. We do see that the good nurse feels sorry for the little boy and decides to return him to "civilization", which implies that "civilization" still exists. Whether the experiment on the island has been approved by "civilization" or not we are not told.
The surrealistic,
David Lynch-ian,
film Earwig (2021),
adapted from Brian Catling's short story, her first film in English,
was co-written with Geoff Cox and photographed by Jonathan Ricquebourg,
with a haunting soundtrack by Augustin Viard.
It unfolds slowly as an obscure and oneiric narrative overflowing with
cryptic allegories and metaphors.
If this film had not been made 24 years after The Lost Highway, it would qualify as a groundbreaking experiment.
Instead it feels like a film in which too many elements fail to fall into place.
A middle-aged man removes a contraption from the jaw of a girl that holds in place a denture. He replaces the denture with a new denture that he takes from the fridge because it is made of ice. At the same time he deposits in the freezer a jar of the girl's saliva.
She has no teeth.
She is fascinated by the painting of a country manor
and wants the man to observe it carefully. He does so for several seconds
and remembers a boy staring at it and then walking down a hallway to a woman
who can make music moving a wet fingertip on the edge of a glass,
a memory that dissolves into an effect of spinning psychedelic lights.
The man grabs a glass and repeats the gesture to produce the sound.
He then eavesdrop at the door of the girl's room, using the glass to amplify
the sound.
When the man goes to sleep, the girl gets out of her room and grabs a glass
from the same cupboard, but she drops it and it breaks.
It takes 24 minutes to hear the first words: someone phones and tells the man
that he has to get ready to take the girl to somewhere else and, first thing, he has to introduce the girl to the outside world.
The apartment is scantily furnished and looks like from an older time, and the loud ticking of a wall clock marks the passage of time.
The man brings clothes to the girl and takes her for a walk in the park.
Suddenly, Mia runs to the edge of a pond and stares at her reflection in the water. She then tries to drown herself but the man pulls her out.
A woman has witnessed the episode from a distance.
Back home, the girl doesn't speak but behaves like a maniac, trying to get out of the door.
The man prepares her dinner, which includes a strange potion.
She eats quietly.
We then see the man leaving the house and heading to a pub.
Another man sits at his table and introduces himself as a traveler and a stranger.
We finally learn the name of our man: Albert.
The stranger thinks they met before at an orphanage, and remembers his wife.
Albert screams that he doesn't have a wife.
The stranger implies that Albert is attracted by the waitress, Celeste.
Albert stabs Celeste in the face with a glass bottle and then runs in the night through the deserted streets.
He stops and remembers a woman (his wife?) giving birth.
Back home, the same man phones and asks about Mia, but then the voice sounds like a recording, like a record playing on a gramophone.
At the hospital a man named Laurence tells Celeste that he will take care of everything. And he does, staying at her bedside and feeding her.
Celeste stares at something, we see psychedelic lights as if they are her thoughts, and they turn into the shape of a glass that Albert is holding at home.
Albert dreams of a woman humming a song and sees his wife at the window.
A bird wakes him up in the middle of the night.
Someone is trying to enter his room.
The following day we see him again changing Mia's ice denture.
Albert then asks the cleaning lady for help with Mia's teeth.
Meanwhile, Laurence invites Celeste to follow him as he has to leave town.
Back home, Celeste fondly stares at a picture of a boy and in the background we see the painting of the country manor. Albert is examining the same painting at the light of a lighter, and notices an object on the steps of the front door that quickly disappears.
Albert gets angry at the cleaning lady who doesn't seem to understand when he tells her to inform their "masters" that he needs help.
Laurence hands Celeste a gift: a small mirror. They go for a walk in the park and she agrees to leave with him. And then we see again the scene of Albert rescuing Mia from the pond: Celeste was the women staring at the scene. Hence the whole section after the pond (the pub, the stranger, the stabbing, Laurence) happened before Albert took Mia to the park.
A man arrives at Albert's place, perhaps responding to his request for help.
They put Mia on a table.
We are not shown what this apparent doctor does to her.
We only see distorted reflections on glasses.
But then he says that he replaced the ice denture with a permanent glass implant.
Albert tries to strangle Mia's black cat that keeps meowing but the cat escapes.
Next we see Albert and Mia on a train. Mia is holding the cat.
The train is a slow train from the 1950s or 1960s.
In another compartment, we see Laurence and Celeste.
Celeste has a scar on the cheek and is still in pain.
Celeste and Laurence get off at a staion. Albert sees Celeste from the window
and Celeste sees him. Seconds later Celeste boards the train again and leaves
Laurence at the station.
The train journey continues as a thick fog descends on the landscape.
Celeste seems to return home, whereas Albert and Mia reach their destination
and Albert serves her a fancy meal.
Celeste in her bed and Albert at the table seem to have the same orgasm
and in fact Albert sees a reflection of Celeste in a plate.
And then Albert is replaced by his wife at the table.
Albert delivers Mia to an office which turns out to be the office of the stranger.
He says that she is not his daughter, but a certificate says that she is.
Albert leaves the building and we see that it is the manor of the painting.
He turns and walks back towards it. He imagines his wife Marie walking towards him but instead it's Celeste, who stabs him on the cheek and then sucks his blood.
The film ends with the two hugging in that zombie-like embrace.
We are not told but we can guess that
the manor is an orphanage,
that Mia is an orphan,
that Albert was himself in that orphanage,
that his wife Marie died in World War II or left him,
and so on.
But it's hard to guess who Celeste and Laurence are.
La Tour de Glace/ The Ice Tower (2025),
co-written again with Geoff Cox and photographed again by Jonathan Ricquebourg
with
sets designed by Julia Irribarriaand,
is a hypnotic meta-fairytale that toys with
Hans Christian Andersens 1844 "The Snow Queen".
It is a film about filmmaking, a film within a film, and perhaps a dream within a dream.
The story (which remains largely ambiguous) is wrapped in kaleidoscopic images of snowy and icy landscapes.
The depressed teenager and the frigid diva are opposite that attracts and
partially reflections of each other (both orphans with no family).
The teenager, however, doesn't want the diva's life.
The ending seems to imply a regression to childhood, or perhaps simply that it has all been the fantastic dream of a creative girl.
The film opens with dreamy free-form images floating on the screen.
A mellifluous female narrator introduces the fairytale of the Snow Queen. The film turns to a
desolate snowy landscape. A group of
children are sitting around the dinner table for evening supper.
Jeanne, a teenager, is late. Before falling asleep, a little girl, Rose, demands that Jeanne reads her a fairytale, and Jeanne reads the story of the Snow Queen.
Jeanne starts reading and later the narrating voice continues the reading.
In the morning Jeanne gives the little girl a
magic bead (part of a broken necklace) that will protect her and leaves the house. She walks through the
snow fields until she reaches a road and then hitchhikes.
She has a picture of a icerink and plans to head there.
When the man who gave her a ride stops suspiciously, she jumps out of the car
and walks the rest of the way in the middle of the night.
She reaches the ice rink and is mesmerized by the skaters, in particular by
a girl.
But when the skaters leave, she is alone in a deserted town without a place to sleep.
Jeanne breaks into a building and sleeps in the basement.
She still has the broken necklace that she touches like a talisman, presumably
something that belonged to her mother.
In the morning she calls Agnes, who tells her that Rose misses her.
We understand that Agnes is running a home for orphans.
While she's on the phone,
Jeanne sees the amazing skater who drops her purse after fighting with a boy.
Jeanne quickly picks it up and reads that the girl is named Bianca.
That night Jeanne explores the building where she is squatting and realizes
that it is a film studio and is intrigued by an elaborate costume.
It turns out they are filming her favorite fairytale: "The Snow Queen".
In the morning she meets Stephanie, who works for the studio,
and initially pretends to be an extra but then candidly admits that she's a squatter. Stephanie doesn't get alarmed and simply takes her in as an extra.
Jeanne tells everybody her name is Bianca. She meets the actress who plays
the queen: Cristina. She is cold like ice and a capricious if
glamorous
primadonna.
Jeanne/Bianca spies Cristina in her dressing room.
When Cristina finally walks on stage, the stage becomes a spectable of light.
But Cristina complains about everything.
Jeanne sees Cristina crying, and starts crying too.
Cristina notices that Jeanne stole something from her, and Jeanne confesses
that she took a prismatic piece of glass from Cristina's costume. Cristina then confesses that she took
three beads from her necklace: they are even.
Jeanne/ Bianca is not only hired as an extra but even promoted by Cristina to a major acting role.
Cristina invites Jeanne/Bianca to have a drink but then forgets about it and
Jeanne waits in vain outside the studio.
The shooting resumes the following day, and it's pretty much a one-woman show
in a magic setting.
When an actress
gets injured by a crow that is used on the set,
Cristina promotes Jeanne/Bianca to play that role.
Cristina even books a hotel room for Bianca, so she doesn't have to sleep in
the basement like a rat.
Bianca is taken to the hotel by Max, Cristina's personal doctor who has been assisting her for years.
Bianca browses a magazine that has Cristina on the cover, clearly fascinated
by the diva.
Bianca imagines Cristina kissing the wounded actress and the kiss healing her wound.
Cristina tells Bianca that she too was in a foster home and she too ran away.
Bianca tells Cristina that she too lived in a foster home after her mother's death when she was six.
Meanwhile, they continue shooting the film in a world of ice.
One night Cristina takes Bianca to a mountain. They confess to each other than they love each other, but Bianca refuses to follow Cristina when she invites her to leave with her.
Cristina collapses in the snow and Max comes to carry her away.
However, it could just be another dream.
Cristina disappears. Bianca meets Max at the ice rink and begs him to take her to Cristina. Max drives her to Cristina's villa.
Bianca confesses to Cristina that her real name is not Bianca.
Cristina kisses Bianca passionately on the mouth.
Bianca, who perhaps was only looking for a mother surrogate, rejects her violently and throws her to the ground.
Jeanne flees and Cristina, alone on top of a tower, holds the beads of her necklace in her hand.
Jeanne stops on a bridge and stares at the prismatic glass in her hand.
Then we are suddenly back to the snowy landscape of the beginning, and there's
a little girl, but not Rose. She's blond, unlike Jeanne who is dark-haired.
But she holds the prismatic glass in her hand.
The narrating voice of the beginning ends the fairytale and tells us that one
can see the queen's realm in all its glory through the "crystal"
and many other realms as well.
(Trivia: Cristinas director Dino is played by Gaspar Noe').
(Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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