How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified most movingly by Anna Torrent’s wide-eyed curiosity and generosity to watching Frankenstein in Victor Erice’s haunting The Spirit of the Beehive? Or is it, in sharp contrast, by depicting it as an affectless precursor to adulthood, like, say, Ezra Miller in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, or any of the many coolly detached, mass media-consuming young adults in Michael Haneke’s films? Perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps all a child — like Lacy in Annie Baker’s Janet Planet — wants is their parent. Or, at least, “a piece of them” — to make every other second of their life not feel like hell.
In Lucile Hadžihalilović’s cinema, primarily centered around exposing and exploring the suppressed psychological pains of growing up, a child’s POV has the potential to be any of these things. But established institutions, run by adults already conditioned to accept obedience as the only valuable currency, often force it to conform to a definition they deem most suitable. All of Hadžihalilović’s feature films — including The Ice Tower, her latest film that premiered at this year’s Berlinale but still doesn’t have an official release date — function as dark fairy tales of sorts, almost always focusing on children placed under the rigorously ritualized spell of authority figures seemingly hell-bent on molding complex personalities into commodified ones. The recurring sameness of the conceit has, understandably, led critics to complain that in both Évolution (2015) and Earwig (2021) — the two films Hadžihalilović has written and directed after her first film, Innocence — the director is simply treading familiar (thematic) water. But the allure of Hadžihalilović’s work has never exactly been what the film is about, but how it is about it. Her remarkably restrained formalism — surprising in and of itself, given her background involves co-writing, co-editing, and producing the “New French Extremity” films of her partner, Gaspar Noé — flits masterfully between the cruel austerity of Michael Haneke and the resplendent expressionism of Lynne Ramsay to capture a child’s changing POV as they resist being indoctrinated into a world governed by inflexible order.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Innocence‘s first hour. We begin by seeing Iris (Zoé Auclair), the youngest of the three characters we follow throughout the film, gradually open her eyes to the strangely unfamiliar but still believable reality of the film. There’s an air of dread, even animosity, the first time Iris meets the other girls, already acclimated to their surroundings. Understandably so: Iris “arrives” in this oddly over-bright, almost colorfully kitschy place inside a coffin, itself eerily marked by an unexplainable cult-like starfish symbol. Before she can find her bearings, everyone else overwhelms her, like hordes of grown-ups swarming to greet a newborn baby. Hadžihalilović communicates Iris’ unease by alternating between two entirely disparate shots: first, a static wide, positioned at a lower level that makes it impossible for us, like Iris, to “see” any of these people; Hadžihalilović’s austere framing essentially “cuts off” the other girls’ heads, depersonalizing them as they tower above a cowering Iris seated inside the coffin. Then, almost immediately, she uses extreme close-up POV shots of different characters — notably, Alice (Lea Bridaroslli) and Bianca (Bérangère Haubruge) — imposing themselves upon her. The combination of shots function to imply one thing: this place and the people within it intimidate Iris.
But, soon enough, this awkwardness and discomfort give way to a perversely utopian vision of sisterhood. The five girls surrounding Iris — distinguished in age and social order by the differing color of the ribbon they wear — “induct” her into this oddly secluded and idyllic fairy-tale-like setting by teaching her how to swim. Because Hadžihalilović tethers us to Iris’ perspective, little of this process immediately strikes us as chillingly sinister. Yes, recurring wide-shots of young girls walking down the dimly lit forest and shadowy caverns softly whispering their secrets to each other consistently put us on edge; we never truly believe everything happening around Iris is normal. But, like her, we also see — and crucially, sense — the allure of this place. Because Hadžihalilović, for all her rigorous formalism, also lets loose at crucial moments in the film: the camera swirls around the wondrously majestic trees as Iris walks hand-in-hand with Bianca, who she comes to accept as her “maternal” figure, through the forest; it gently ebbs and flows with Iris as she learns to ebb and flow with the tide.
However, once she fully learns to do so, the film becomes less enthrallingly enigmatic and more coldly sinister. This is very much by design as Iris, essentially, goes from rebelling against the Suspiria-like school’s indoctrination to succumbing to it, and the film’s visual language follows suit. Innocence’s second hour, then, feels much closer in spirit and form to a Haneke film, whereby Iris’ POV becomes indistinguishable from that of Alice and Bianca, whose shared POV itself feels indistinguishable from that of the school’s teachers — Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard) and Mademoiselle Edith (Hélène de Fougerolles). All the signs of rebellion — the spirit of discovery and subjectivity — are either entirely muted or quickly extinguished. Alice, for instance, seeks the approval of her teachers but doesn’t get it. So, she decides to escape the school — not to discover what’s outside, but in the hopes of being discovered by someone. (The film doesn’t reveal what happens to her, but implies that she, like another student before her, has been dealt with rather severely). With Bianca, the eldest of the three, Hadžihalilović shows what happens at the end of her term at this school because she, unlike Iris or Alice, makes the least effort to resist it. The school has indoctrinated her enough to accept herself — without much contestation — as little more than a “saleable asset” whose real value will be determined by the amount a man is willing to pay for her. She’s no different from a pet animal or set prop, an insignificant part of a whole who believes what Mademoiselle Eva preaches to her students — “obedience is the only path to happiness” — without ever convincingly feeling happy at any moment in the film. Here, the death of innocence is not marked by a bittersweet maturation, then, but by a tragic regression. Subjectivity — expressed formally via an intermittently roving handheld camera and symbolically via the rapidly spawning wings of a butterfly — is clipped and sterilized into a brutally chilling form of resigned objectivity.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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