This got a lot of attention, to say nothing of a distribution deal, for the prize-winning performance at the Venice Film Festival of its four-year-old star, Victoire Thivisol. Anyone, needless to say, would have to be pretty hardhearted not to be touched by the spectacle of a crying little girl who wants her mommy (killed in a car wreck) or even by the simple, static line of her troubled, plaintive brow. And anyone who has spent so much as a single Thanksgiving dinner in the company of a four-year-old cannot help but be amazed at the elicited co-operation, enunciation, unselfconsciousness, etc., especially during the boarding school section where the population of pre-schoolers explodes. (One highlight: the knowledgeable playmate expatiating on the differences between Catholics and Jews.) But still. Mlle. Thivisol is not Annie Girardot. She is not even the more or less same-aged Ana Torrent (a generation earlier) in the Spanish Spirit of the Beehive. Jacques Doillon, whose sensitive, attentive, perceptive movies are generally passed over for U.S. distribution, directs the action, if that's the word for it, in an extreme intimiste manner. Intimiste, that is, to a stifling, claustrophobic, monotonous degree: faces, faces, faces, and no air to breathe. And the fantastical finale does not work on any level: as metaphor, as psychological reality, as magic realism, as break in the routine, as fitting resolution to what came before. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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