The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak and hat against a blazingly white landscape — and often in a long shot obscuring her features — she stands in stark relief to her surroundings, at once clear as a symbol and difficult to read as an individual. This image is an effective metonym for the film it appears in: just as, in this reiterated shot, the girl is both revealed and obscured by the environment she is visibly separate from, the film unspools like a parable of how meeting one’s supposed opposite can both uncover repressed truths and render illegible one’s existing self-conception.
The Girl in the Snow, written by Hémon and Anaïs Tellene with Maxence Stamatiadis, follows a young, secular school teacher (Galatéa Bellugi) who has taken a position in a remote village in the French Alps, just before 1899 recedes to make way for a new century. She begins her assignment with vigor and utter conviction in her own moral and intellectual correctness, but the resistance of the villagers, who have their own closely held convictions that often oppose hers, stymies her efforts. She eventually relaxes her judgment and becomes more of an equal member of the community, which coincides with her own gradual acknowledgment of her sexuality. Yet strange consequences follow these changes in her personality: when she has a sexual experience, avalanches and unexplained disappearances tend to follow.
The film is set over the course of a long winter, and director of photography Marine Atlan highlights the vast, icy grandeur of the mountainous setting by using a cool color palate and periodic wide shots of the landscape — an aesthetic approach which brings to mind Mikhail Krichman’s photography for Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio, another artfully crafted film with an Alpine setting. Yet Bellugi brings a simmering heat to her performance as Aimée, the teacher; she is initially given to bursts of excitement to teach the children or pique at her frosty reception by the community, and she later bubbles over with desire. Bellugi’s spirited performance, evoking both her character’s energy and naïveté, is a canny counterbalance to the more reserved, skeptical villagers. While the film’s gelid, often shadowy look is aligned more with the hidebound rural community than the would-be-reformer Aimée, the scenes involving her sexual awakening come closest to adopting her perspective in a visual sense — particularly a narratively crucial sex scene between her and a local boy, Pépin (a reserved, yet magnetic Samuel Kircher), in which their foreplay involving a map and a magnifying glass is bathed in warm, sensuous lantern light.
Just as the narrative makes some unexpected turns — particularly following the pivotal sex scene between Aimée and Pépin — the film features a number of unconventional aesthetic choices, most prominently its distinctive score. Composed by Emile Sornin, this score is a jangly blend of strings, percussion, and staccato voices singing in unison, with chromatic melodies that clash and dip into minor keys. Sometimes this music imbues scenes with a dark whimsy, while at other times it lends an incantatory quality. In a New Years’ party scene, the most festive in this emotionally turbulent film, the score is even diegetic — two revelers play instruments that underscore a joyous social dance. The score and sound design also emerge to the fore in a scene where a feverish Aimée recovers — aided by folk remedies, including a beheaded chicken placed on her chest — in a half-conscious daze; music mingles with the sounds of human voices and farm animals, becoming muffled and distorted as if Aimée were underwater. (In fact, the film’s French title, L’engloutie, translates to “The Submerged.”)
The cumulative effect of the film — with its formal and aesthetic idiosyncrasies, its narrative drift into unreality — is, if sometimes puzzling, ultimately enrapturing. Aimée’s transformative foray into the mountains occasions a plunge into what she has repressed and excluded from her life — namely sex, death, and the unpredictability of nature — breaking down her identity before she can escape with the thaw of spring.
Though Aimée is the film’s focus, Hémon hints at how the community she leaves behind may think of her after her departure. They are shown throughout the film to have a strong tradition of oral storytelling, sharing fables of Death visiting men in the form of shadows and seductive women attempting to drag men off cliffs. One can imagine, years later, the children who were taught by Aimée telling the story of the intruder who seduced and preyed upon members of their community and attempted to destroy their way of life. It is a fable with two opposing sides, irreconcilable perspectives that nevertheless shed cold light and cast unnerving shadows on each other.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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