French-Moroccan filmmaker Mona Achache digs for knowledge to better understand the several generations of female writers in her family in the docufiction Little Girl Blue, and more specifically, to come to terms with her mother Carole Achache’s suicide, who died in 2016 at age 63.
The film, which screens at Oldenburg International Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes, is a highly personal, frank and emotionally vulnerable departure from her comedies The Hedgehog (2009) and Les Gazelles (2014), with prospects for international interest heightened by an intense, gripping performance from star Marion Cotillard, signed on to embody the director’s late mother in re-enacted conversations.
The tragedy of a suicide in a family colours and reshapes everything that went before. Little Girl Blue shows the director, appearing as herself and addressing us and the departed in voiceover, in a Parisian apartment. She sifts through stacks of old photos of her relatives and letters in crates, fixing some to the wall. These traces are recast as evidence, as remembering takes on the form of an existential investigation. Recorded conversations with “surviving witnesses” of her mother’s childhood are exhumed and played back, considered as clues to the seeds of her final act. Mona’s father had implored her not to waste her energies on something intrinsically incomprehensible and direct them instead to the living. But for the women in the family, who wrote about their mothers and reproduced their ambiguities and psychological struggles across generations, the mystery of who their predecessors really were has been all-consuming and defining. Trauma as well as talent are their legacies.
The film consciously examines what it is to retell a story and mythologise it. Existing in a family in which numerous dramatic, clandestine tales were floating around warped one’s sense of self, what it meant to be interesting, and one’s conception of purpose. Among the swirl of tales, in which the generations blur, is one about a gang rape in Pamplona during a bullfight. A sense of gendered violence as an inevitability was planted in the women of the family, who considered themselves cursed.
Central to these reflections is the figure of famed avant-garde writer and one-time vagabond Jean Genet, who was a close friend of Monique Lange, Mona’s grandmother and an editor at the publishing house Gallimard as well as a writer in her own right. That closeness extended to Carole, with her mother’s complicity, and when she was only eleven, she would skip class to visit him. Genet, always controversial, does not come off well in the film. He’s characterised as a perverse influence who hated the “banal” above all else, and would break people by pushing them as far as he could into their own contradictions, simply for a kick (his tightrope-walker lover Abdallah also died by suicide). As a child encouraged to participate with adults in the literary milieu of ‘60s Paris and Morocco, in which power abuses were normalised, Carole was inevitably plunged into boundary transgressions and sexual confusion. Years later, in an era more conducive to the reevaluation of exploitative relationships, the director tries to psychologically untangle the harm done by men of art-world stature, who could seem to be both “swines” and captivating people, simultaneously.
Carole embraced the mood of rebellion of ‘68, drifting between anarchist groups before heading to New York. She became a sex worker and a photographer, and started, in 2008, to write about the family’s secrets. Despair over later rejection by the literary establishment is portrayed as a contributing factor in her demise. While ample photographs bring time into textured focus, it is Cotillard who brings emotionally devastating immediacy. In an inspired scene of metamorphosis, she enters as herself, undresses and puts on Carole’s clothes, complete with wig and spritz of perfume. Her performance is an act of embodiment that, if not bringing forth the dead, can provide a conduit for insight and communion. Simply relating a long story from the past to the camera in half-light, she holds us fixated. An intelligent and inventive play on biography and literature, raw with emotion but devoid of false sentiment, Little Girl Blue reveals how the hold of stories can decimate and confine a person, even as they seek expression or liberation through them.
Director, screenwriter: Mona Achache
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Mona Achache, Marie Bunel, Marie-Christine Adam, Pierre Aussedat, Jacques Boudet, Didier Flamand
Production Design: Helena Cisterne, Daniel WeimerEditor: Valerie Loiseleux
Cinematography: Noe Bach
Costume Design: Caroline Spieth
Music: Valentin Co
Production companies: Les Films du Poisson (France), Wrong Men (Belgium), France 2 Cinema (France)
Sales: Charades (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In French
95 minutes
