Innocence, a 2004 film by director Lucile Hadzhilalilovic, begins with a young girl being released from a locked coffin by six slightly older girls in matching white dresses and different coloured ribbons in their hair. They take her in, accept her as one of their own, and explain that this quaint little house in this verdant and idyllic forest is now her home. Details come slowly. There are five other houses in the park, each with their own set of girls. The park is surrounded by a wall; if they try to escape, the girls will be "punished." During the day, the girls learn science and dancing from adult instructors, and at night they are tended to by elderly women. At nine o'clock, the eldest girl leaves the house and goes somewhere, and the rest of the girls go to bed at ten.
There's something about this movie that makes you look for a big reveal. I half-expected it to become a science fiction movie, and at the very least, I thought one little girl was going to get raped. It's called Innocence, for god's sake. But the audience is never let in on the secrets guarded by the girls' caretakers, and it's at times difficult to know whether or not the caretakers know these secrets themselves. We know whatever the girls know, and it's not much of anything.
The park in Innocence is a lot like childhood itself. It seems sinister as often as it seems friendly, and there are rules that are unclear, consequences that are also unclear, and elaborate systems predicated on reasoning which is again unclear. The film focuses primarily and one at a time on Zoe Auclair's Iris, the youngest girl of the house who arrives at the beginning of the film; Lea Bridarolli's Alice, who is near the middle of the age range; and Bérangère Haubruge's eldest girl and junior matriarch Bianca. Each girl is faced with specific concerns - Iris tries to learn the rules and get along with the others, Alice is focused on a dance recital whose winner is chosen to leave the park early, and Bianca is attempting to prepare her protege Nadia to take her place when she leaves for good. But despite their varying goals, they still have many things in common - they have theories about the outside world but are unsure what to expect, they are confused about the elements at play in the park and have no idea what they mean, and they at times resent their virtual imprisonment yet fear moving beyond it.
In one scene Alice ventures to the wall surrounding the park and climbs it to successfully peer over the other side. As she's climbing, it's easy for the audience to get caught up in guessing what she will see, as if this is the scene that will explain the rest of the movie for us. Will it be a dystopian ruin? Will it be an endless sea? But what she finds is just more of the same. Though they might not be contained to single instances like in the case of Alice, I feel like children face the same revelations as they grow up. Adults walk around like they know something children don't, and we all come to hope that we'll stumble upon whatever secret it is that they know that makes the world make any kind of sense. In Innocence, as in the transition from child to adulthood, the only big reveal is that there are no secrets to learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment