In the television series Dexter, our eponymous antagonist finds himself gifted, or cursed, with an insatiable urge to kill. Although he grows up under the guidance of his foster father, who trains him to channel his desires prudently and through a self-styled code of morality, the crux of his psychopathy is revealed to be a childhood episode so traumatic — watching his birth mother get sawed in half by a vengeful cartel — that it reconfigures his memories and rewires his impulses. Perverse though this comparison may be, the life of Dexter Morgan is not entirely estranged from the ineffable sound and color of three-year-old Amélie (Loïse Charpentier), whose variegated substance is brilliantly yet banally conveyed through the post hoc musings of her imagined persona. The animated feature debut of Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain could easily present an alternately perturbing and whimsical explication of the self as it uproots its shaky foundations and gradually reaffirms its place in the world. Put another way, serial killer Dexter is a stunted Amélie, bound by unresolved compulsion to reassert his primal and eternal flight of feeling.
This is largely due to the subject of Little Amélie, which adapts Amélie Nothomb’s similarly-titled autobiographical novel and adopts the latter’s wide-eyed pronouncements on the nature of life. Born a “vegetable,” in the doctor’s words, Amélie can’t move or express any outward sentiment for the bulk of her infancy. Her parents, however, don’t seem to mind, and when an earthquake strikes before her third birthday, its tremors effect an awakening that jolts the girl into the realm of verbal intersubjectivity. “Like the rain,” she observes, “I was exquisite and perilous, benign and deadly, silent and tempestuous.” Armed with cheerful French existentialism, Vallade and Han construe out of this observation a vividly transcendent prism of childhood curiosity and freedom, subjecting Amélie’s own gaze to omniscient introspection. Born Belgian to a diplomat father but stationed in the far East — Japan — with two older, relatively normal siblings, she comes to witness a gnawing displacement and incompleteness of the world around her: race, gender, and even language present themselves as inscrutable facts to a mind enlivened by make-believe fiction.
A precious and intensely personal reckoning thus awaits the viewer, for whom Little Amélie will likely recall the impressionistic wonder of early Miyazaki. Every turn in the film portends a discovery, a witness, a reinscribing of language onto the texture of consciousness. Amélie’s closest companion, her Japanese nanny Nishio (Victoria Grobois), inducts her serenely into the great mystery of life — “one great chomping mouth that spares nothing,” as Amélie puts it — but also sparing her the direct indignity and horror of the knowledge of death. This girl will have to experience for herself, whether in the distance and frailty of her grandmother or from nearly drowning, twice; so will she have to come to terms with the strangeness of being. Meshing watercolor strokes with the expressive clarity of anime, the filmmakers nobly and not unsuccessfully attempt to translate Nothomb’s cross-cultural and metaphysical script onto the screen. The result is sometimes slight, but the ideas they evoke are indelible. One such idea, of little children being impervious gods who slowly descend into mortality, evokes a spiritual dimension while also (unintentionally) embodying a quirk of the translation. As the novel’s French subtitle, “la métaphysique des tubes,” gets adulterated into the simpler “character of rain,” it echoes Amélie’s transition from her earliest form, a vessel of pure presence, into a corporeal flux of pure sublimation. Such are the journeys we all must go through, and from which we derive the quiet joy of looking back. — MORRIS YANG
DIRECTOR: Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han; CAST: Loïse Charpentier, Victoria Grobois, Yumi Fujimori, Cathy Cerda; DISTRIBUTOR: GKIDS; IN THEATERS: October 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 18 min.
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