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This richly imaginative debut feature immerses the viewer
in the mysterious world of an all-female boarding school,
where the pre-pubescent pupils are being prepared for
future reproductive duties outside of the establishment's
forbidding walls. Adapted from a short story by the 19th-century
German playwright Frank Wedekind, and impressively acted
by its young cast, Innocence is a compelling blend of
'realism' and fantasy, with not a jolly hockey stick in
sight.
Innocence is dedicated to Gaspar Noe, director Hadzihalilovic's
partner and regular collaborator, yet her film eschews
the sensationalist shock tactics of Noe's Irréversible
in favour of a much more ambiguous and poetic approach.
Set within a woodland forest, the school itself is simultaneously
an idyll and a prison: the girls, aged between six and
12 and dressed in identical white uniforms and sporting
different coloured ribbons in their hair, are shown blissfully
swimming and larking about in the river. But completely
separated from their families, they are also forbidden
from attempting to leave the grounds, or from asking questions
about what goes on at night in the main building. As their
teacher Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard), insists,
"Obedience is the only path that leads to happiness."
Hadzihalilovic maintains the mood of eerie ambiguity,
using a complex soundscape of recurring noises - gushing
water, ticking clocks, the cries of animals, the rumble
of underground trains - to heighten the sense of foreboding.
Atmospherically shot by Benoît Debie, Innocence
never does explain the strange events in its midst, but
this unsettling evocation of girlhood concludes with a
release of feeling that is genuinely euphoric.
Review by Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: Original
Article
Whether you're a film culture optimist or a maddened
discontent, it's difficult to argue that originality has
been in great supply recently; my favorite films of the
year so far (2046, Keane, The Weeping Meadow) are extensions
or revisitations of work their filmmakers have done in
years past. So, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence feels
something like a hammer blow to the glabella. Derived
from a (currently) untranslated Frank Wedekind story and
seething with conceptual potency, the movie feels sui
generis, a verdant, ambiguous dream of childhood, consciousness,
and oppression.
It's all parable, a Rorschach blot scenario played out
in feminized old-world ritual. We're in a vast tract of
European forest, illuminated by chandelier lamps, subgrounded
with what seems to be an ancient, rumbling sewer system,
and surrounded by an unscalable wall. At the centre lies
a huge girls' school, populated by only two teachers (Marion
Cotillard and Héléne de Fougerolles) and
a dozen or so prepubescent girls, each wearing age-coded
hair ribbons, new students arriving in suddenly materialized
coffins and with fading memories of their families and
lives outside. There are no men, and many rules. The school
maintains a nurturing, if constricting, cloistered atmosphere,
but there are glimpses of matters-disappearances, deaths,
violations-we, like the students, never fully understand.
The girls, gently examined, indoctrinated, and trained
in matters of traditional girlishness, are certainly being
groomed, but for what?
A debut filmmaker with electrifying confidence, Hadzihalilovic
cat-plays with our instant dread- unanswered narrative
questions are supposed to have horrifying answers, right?-but
Innocence has a more sophisticated program than you might
suspect from her credits as Gaspar Noé's producer-editor.
The mysteries at the film's pitiful heart aren't sexual,
but then again, they are: Wedekind always worked in lurid
metaphoric colors, and Innocence is a fable of puberty
told not as awakening but as subjugation. Call it the
feminist flip side to Zéro de Conduite, where revolt
is not a condoned option (a single escapee is far from
heroic, dropping into the unknown woods over the wall,
never to be seen again), and Wedekind's anti-bourgeois
take on the "tragedy of sex" prevails. In its
view of childhood as totalitarian citizenship, Hadzihalilovic's
film stands, quietly, in a gender-furious class by itself.
At the same time, the particulars are intensely imagined
and naturalistic, and the symbology is as subterranean
as you'd like to dig. Rich as a fruitcake in its Romantic
tableaux (photographed by Benoît Debie), the movie
is not merely ironically titled-like David Lynch's films,
its heart bleeds for the systematic death of purity, while
never idealizing the young. A standing distribution dare
after it showed up in the Walter Reade's last "Rendez-Vous
With French Cinema" series, Innocence is not merely
the year's best first film, but one of the great statements
on the politics of being 'tween.
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCILE HADZIHALILOVIC
What made you decide to adapt the short story 'Mine-Haha,
or The Corporal Education of Young Girls'?
The friend who suggested I read this Symbolist short story,
written in 1888 by the German playwright Frank Wedekind,
said it was definitely for me. Sure enough, I had never
previously found a text that presented everything I wanted
to recount on screen in quite such an incredible way.
What I liked most in the story was the way the school
was set up: an enclosed space where young girls live in
autarchy, the elder girls looking after the younger ones,
the importance of dance and physical exercises, and the
essential relationship with nature. But there's also something
very mysterious about it all. I immediately dismissed
the hypothesis of a sinister background that might evoke
a form of child prostitution; I saw it more as a kind
of utopia to educate children by liberating their bodies,
with all the negative totalitarian aspects that can have.
The school is a paradise and a prison at the same time.
But many questions remain. Even the departure of one of
the heroines doesn't provide any certainties. Then there's
the underground world, the train that travels beneath
the school, the strange little theatre...
What changes did you make to the short story?
- When writing the script I realised that above all I
shouldn't try to explain anything. Any explanation brought
the whole edifice tumbling down like a house of cards.
The changes I made are therefore factual. For example,
in Wedekind's text we follow the same girl through all
her years at the school.It would have been difficult for
me to find several different children to play the same
girl at different ages, so I split the heroine into three
characters: Iris, the youngest girl, who arrives at the
school, Alice, who has already spent several years there
and rebels, and Bianca, who is at the end of the school
cycle and represents a young girl shaped by it. During
the film, there is a relay from one to the other. What's
more, this enabled me to maintain a certain unity of time
by fitting the story into one year, marked by the rhythm
of passing seasons. I also made the eldest girls younger
to keep the story plausible. In his short story, Wedekind
suggests that they are 14 to 15. I reckoned that beyond
the age of 11 or 12, the girls would certainly have tried
to run away. This age suited me all the more for being
the time when menstruation first starts, the end of a
kind of pre-adolescence.
In the original text, none of the girls try to get away.
In the film too, most of the girls seem to have forgotten
everything about the outside world. It's almost as though
their minds have retracted into the confines of the school.
But for dramatic reasons, I invented the characters of
two girls who try to run away. I also added natural science
classes to the physical education imagined by Wedekind,
again for reasons of realism. This meant I could develop
a relationship with nature, which I found very important,
and stress the theme of bodily metamorphosis.
Nothing overly dramatic happens, so how do you explain
the rising tide of anxiety the film provokes?
Nothing dramatic happens on a sexual level, but there
is still the risk that the story could veer into another
dimension at any moment. And then there's the anxiety
of knowing what Bianca, the eldest girl, is going to find
outside. I tried to transcribe in the film what I felt
when reading the story. Starting with questions about
what all this means. The further the story progresses
without giving any answers, the more the anxiety builds.
And then there's the oppressive underlying notion that
the girls are in fact primarily being prepared to reproduce.
From the natural science classes insisting on the cycle
of life to the physical exercises to make them pretty
and graceful, it all points to this idea that they are
being educated to perpetuate the species.
Isn't it paradoxical to prepare them for reproduction
without them ever seeing any boys?
Exactly: in this exclusively female world, what could
these little girls want more than to meet boys? At their
age, relationships with boys are often conflictual, and
the idea of a place where they can blossom far from boys
is quite conceivable. But this complete absence of male
characters becomes stifling. Half the human species is
missing from this world, not just for the girls but for
the adults too. The old maids and the two young teachers
are deprived of all relationships with men. A closed space
like this, with only girls in it, evokes a convent and
its opposite, a brothel - without being one or the other,
of course. I particularly wanted to keep any religious
elements out of the film and develop a kind of pantheism
instead.
Do you think that your film will be received in the
same way by both men and women?
I think that for women it will be easier to identify with
the girls; they won't ask so many questions about the
meaning of all this. The absence of male characters will
probably be more unsettling for men, who may be left with
more of a focus on the way they view these young girls.
I haven't tried to convey any particular message. I portray
the way this school works without saying whether it's
good or bad. Just as there are no answers to the questions,
there's no moral to the story either.
What do you hope for from audiences?
This film is like a small theatre that I'm inviting people
into. I hope they will be charmed and engaged and that
they'll enjoy remembering it afterwards. The idea was
to make an appealing work, for people to be able to slip
into the girls' worlds and create their own film. As a
spectator, I like films that take you into a particular
physical world by playing on sound and sensorial perception.
Similarly, I wanted to offer audiences an emotional experience.
During the screening, two others films came to my mind:
Dario Argento's Suspiria and Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging
Rock.
I'm delighted by these two references. In fact, Dario
Argento apparently based Suspiria very loosely on the
same short story by Wedekind. I didn't know it when I
was shooting my film and I didn't really have Suspiria
in mind. But I discovered cinema at the age of 13 with
Dario Argento's films and their very sober eroticism.
the reference to Picnic at Hanging Rock is more conscious,
even though I haven't actually seen the film again since
it was released. I especially remembered those young white-clad
girls out in nature, with a sensual and very mysterious
side to it all. Like mine, Peter Weir's film asks questions
that aren't anecdotal. I would also add THE SPIRIT OF
THE BEEHIVE by Victor Erice, for its underlying fantasy
aspect linked to the world of childhood. Nevertheless,
these are secondary references and I never had a specific
film in mind when I was making Innocence.
Much of the emotional experience which Innocence proposes
is conveyed through the remarkable cinematography. What
made you choose Benoît Debie as director of photography?
I liked the lighting he did on a short film by Fabrice
du Welz, the Belgian director of Calvaire, for which he
also did the camerawork. And of course his work on Irreversible,
which also led him to do Dario Argento's latest film.
Benoît has a superb taste for colours and really
dark shadows, and I knew that he was ready to take risks
with the lighting. He is capable of working fast too,
which is essential when you're shooting with children.
On set, he was even better than I'd hoped.
What were your main options, image-wise?
To counterbalance the dreamlike elements, I wanted the
lighting to be as realistic as possible. Apart from the
theatre scenes, which for obvious reasons had sophisticated
lighting, we restricted ourselves to daylight or light
sources within the frame, without ever using a single
spotlight. To that extent, it could be said that the film's
lighting was co-signed by the production designer, Arnaud
de Moléron. He had to take Benoît Debie's
demands into account when it came to deciding how many
lamps would feature in the decor and where they would
be. I was also lucky to be able to count on Jim Howe,
an exceptional gaffer full of inventive solutions. One
element, however, was not realistic: the evening scenes
were shot in broad daylight as day-for-night. The digital
grading we used enabled us to work on the evening effect
in a way that would have been impossible with traditional
grading. In the end you have an impression of an endless
twilight, something that's neither day nor night; it contributes
to the dreamlike feeling of strangeness by erasing the
passage of time.
The other very important thing for me image-wise was colour
intensity. I wanted a rendering close to Techni-color.
The images we shot were initially very colourful, but
we upped the intensity during grading to make this world
even more attractive: the greens in the park, the whiteness
of the uniforms, and the different colours of the ribbons
in the girls' hair. For both the colours and the visual
themes I had two pictorial references in mind: the Symbolists
(notably Belgian) and Magritte.
Why did you shoot in CinemaScope?
It's a format that allows you to frame several characters
at once, yet it can also be very oppressive: it encloses
while appearing to open up. For budgetary reasons, however,
I couldn't use real CinemaScope, but Super 16 blown up
to 35 mm.
How easy was it to finance the film?
It actually turned out to be much harder than I thought.
Ten years ago, you could easily propose atypical subjects
that didn't fit into the dominant genres. But nowadays
in France it's not easy to finance a first feature that
isn't a comedy or an action movie. Fortunately Patrick
Sobelman, the producer, was very tenacious and managed
to rally several foreign partners from England, Belgium
and Japan. Agnès B participated as well. Also Wild
Bunch, who are handling international sales, came in on
the project very early and helped us a great deal. In
the end I had the means I needed to make the film without
having to sacrifice my aesthetic and narrative choices.
Why is there virtually no background music?
Apart from two scenes, the only music heard in the film
comes from a few classical pieces which the girls dance
to or listen to. I didn't want music the rest of the time
because I wanted to highlight the other sounds and avoid
any outside commentary. As with the lighting, I wanted
each sound to have an intrinsic justification, a source
within the film's own universe. It gives the decor weight,
its own existence. It also avoids giving the audience
indications about what they should feel or what the scene
might mean.
The soundtrack is no less expressive...
- It is based on the sounds in the park (animal cries,
the wind, the waterfall and sounds of running water) and
the sounds inside the house (creaking floorboards, wheezing
plumbing and especially the obsessive tick-tock of the
clocks). Each of these elements can be reassuring or harrowing
by turns. The sound of the train travelling under the
school and the noise of the rushing waterfall and fountain
highlight both the dramatic atmosphere and the mystery.
With the sound crew, we tried to compose a kind of musical
and dramatic score containing a number of leitmotivs (the
clocks, water, the train, the lamps, the insects).
Was this conception of sound already present when you
wrote the script?
Yes, I had planned to use a lot of natural sounds to create
both atmosphere and effect. Also, there was never any
question of looping the girls' dialogue. Even if that
meant not always perfectly understanding what they were
saying. For a story that's supposed to take place in a
location shut off from the world, shooting live sound
without picking up any aeroplane or motorway noises was
a real challenge. Just as no sounds from the park filter
into the houses, no noises were supposed to filter into
the park from outside it either, like a 'vacuum-packed'
world.
Was working with children as hard as people say it
is?
Yes and no. You need time. There were major constraints
for the youngest girls because you can't make them work
more than three or four hours a day. And rightly so, for
they tire quickly and whenever they'd had enough we had
to invent new tricks to get them back in front of the
camera. The hardest scenes were the ones with the group
of youngest girls. If just one of the five started playing
up, general mayhem quickly broke out. To play Iris, I
chose little seven-year-old Zoé Auclair. I was
very lucky to find her. Physically she is very petite
and could pass for a six-year-old, but with the extra
maturity of a girl one year older. Above all, she has
great charisma. At first I told myself that these little
girls were all going to be natural in front of the camera
and that I'd be able to let them improvise. But that turned
out to be difficult because we gave them a lot of constraints:
we used a fixed frame for many shots, which meant the
girls weren't allowed to step out of frame and also had
to keep certain positions within in it, in relation to
how I was directing the scene. The costumes were also
a constraint. I had obviously avoided giving them their
dialogues to learn. There were few enough dialogues for
me to simply tell them what to say ten minutes before
the take. During the eight-week shoot my little actresses
integrated these different rules well. But oddly enough,
they didn't really like improvising; they preferred to
obey my directions, as though I was their school mistress.
In the end, the fact that they are sometimes a little
stiff or passive corresponded well to the whole world
of the school.
How did you go about casting them?
My idea was to favour girls who had never worked in front
of a camera and look for girls in dance classes, because
there was some choreography to perform. I didn't do any
classical screen tests. After an initial selection we
organised mini dance workshops per age-group. The process
ended with a short interview. The casting was completed
too late for them to be able to spend any time together
before the shoot, but that wasn't such a bad thing. In
relation to the plot, it was good for Bérangère
Haubruge (Bianca) and Zoé Auclair (Iris) to first
meet each other on set.
Given this context, the days when you shot with Marion
Cotillard and Hélène de Fougerolles must
have been quite different…
The set was entirely organised around the children. We
had all regressed. We were dependent on their need to
pee, their sudden tired or hungry spells and their various
whims. When Marion and Hélène arrived, they
immediately understood the situation and knew how to make
themselves almost invisible; put simply, they had no qualms
about playing baby-sitter. They both developed emotional
ties with the children that served the story in the film.
The tricky thing for them was not to let the children
throw them off, to manage to act their scenes despite
the girls' sometimes unpredictable reactions.
How did you choose Marion Cotillard and Hélène
de Fougerolles for these supporting roles?
I thought of them as soon as it was decided that, to reassure
the financiers, I would have to hire famous actresses
to play the two teachers, even though they weren't main
roles. They both have an image of being modern but I find
they both have classical, rather timeless faces that corresponded
well with the atmosphere of the film. I also wanted actresses
who were very pretty and feminine. Giving Hélène
the part of a limping spinster took away any clichéd
aspect to the role. With Marion, I liked her melancholic
air - it went so well with how I imagined the character
she plays. These two teachers are like models of how the
girls want to be when they grow up. But there are also
problems: one of them limps and the other seems very unhappy.
This creates a discrepancy that keeps the mystery going
and maintains a kind of sexy confusion that I liked. For
the dance classes and the little theatre ballet, you worked
with a choreographer... Yes. I needed someone with experience
and who liked working with children. Someone like Pedro
Pauwels, who is a dancer and choreographer. I had enjoyed
a small show he had done with children who had never taken
dance lessons. It was very pretty and simple, in the spirit
of what I had been imagining for the film. I didn't actually
want any classical dance, but something freer. Having
said that, I imposed quite a few constraints on him: the
theatre choreography had to take the restricted number
of dancers into account and accommodate the winged costumes,
plus I had already chosen all the music the girls would
dance to. Then there was the style of the dance: it couldn't
seem too contemporary, I wanted it to have a slight 60s
feel to it.
A 60s feel?
Yes, the 60s were something of a reference for everyone
on set, from costumes to set design. That didn't mean
a full reconstruction, of course, rather a trend. I chose
the 60s for the slightly quaint old rigidity they had,
through which the first signs of freedom could be glimpsed.
The utopias of Wedekind's day are echoed by the utopias
of the 60s. I doubtless also chose this period because
it harks back to my childhood and my first perception
of the world, the one that shapes us forever. But once
again, the main concern was to maintain a timeless quality,
like in
dreams.
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