Justly acclaimed film by writer/director Céline Sciamma opens with deceptive naturalism as an eight-year old granddaughter bids adieu (literally adieu as it’s a French film) to a series of elderly ladies, hall neighbors at the assisted living home/hospice where her grandmother has recently died. The next few days will see her with her father as he cleans up Grandma’s home while the mother is off . . . somewhere. But then the little girl chases a lost ball into the forest just behind the house, and we all know what happens when you head into the woods looking for a lost object in a fable. Hard to say anything else here without major SPOILER ALERTS, but you should be okay if you put the left side of your brain on pause. The rest of the film is all right side of the brain anyway. Team Jung rather Team Freud, so to speak. Because what should we find in the forest but another eight-year-old girl, a dead ringer (pun intended) who will become her new special friend, and invite to her nearby home, so much like the house she and her father are closing down. (That’s twins Joséphine & Gabrielle Sanz playing the dopplegänger kids. One of whom is a considerably better actress than the other, though nothing could make me reveal which one!) It’s a treat to see how simply Sciamma handles this, and to imagine how a Hollywood treatment would ruin things with explanations or psychobabble. (She’s the anti-M. Night Shyamalan we’ve long hoped for.) Yet for all its charm, wisdom on childhood connections & fantasy, its refusal to draw thick black lines of demarcation between now & then/here & there/generation divide, the film somehow misses the emotional tug you expect . . . or perhaps are conditioned to expect. Something that could be the subject for Sciamma’s next project.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Given a more literal edge, similar ideas pop up in a fair number of classic kid lit. Frances Hodson Burnett's much adapted THE SECRET GARDEN an apt example. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-secret-garden-1949.html
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