From the Aug 3 – Aug 9, 2000 issue

Film

A Maple Leaf Tip-In

Set Me Free from Myself

by Barley Blair

MONTREAL, 1963: Hanna is 13, almost 14. Her father is an out-of-work immigrant poet with an evil temper, her mother a sorry depressive who attempted suicide. Hanna uses one handhold after another to drag herself into adulthood: her brother, a loving friend, a sympathetic teacher, and most strikingly a movie that she stumbles into and then sees four times, Godard's Vivre Sa Vie. A child who has had to be responsible far too early, she learns to embrace responsibility because it can set her free. Director Léa Pool does honor to Godard's galumphing existentialism, using the rhapsody Michel Legrand wrote for Vivre to interweave Godard's scenes with her own. And I remembered that Godard's heroine also turned to a movie for inspiration.

Of the stories we need to hear again and again, the most important is "The Child Who Escapes." A child, often an adolescent, is threatened. In adventure stories, the threat comes from outside; in drama, from the child's own family. Sometimes the child escapes only in release (The Little Match Girl); sometimes there are wacky plot twists (The Resurrection). In general, however, the child survives and triumphs. Even the most pedestrian examples of this genre have the power to move us. Who among us is not a child? Whose escape is not in doubt?

So I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't identify with Hanna, portrayed in a tender, unclichéd script by Pool and in an intricate performance by Karine Vanasse. Hanna is no chapbook Everychild, but a living individual whose curiosity and confusion and courage compel our affinity.

With age, however, other, more difficult readings become possible, and they make me happy that this is Pool's sixth film, not her first. Miki Manojlovic, as the father (previously trashy in Artemisia), here gives a subtle rendering of an unsubtle man. Pascale Bussières, as the mother, retreats from contact, from feeling. Neither of them is made out to be a monster. I see myself in his rage and posturing, in her blankness. And I have to face the fact: This identification must mean that I want my children to escape--from me.

Barley Blair is the pseudonym of a little old lady trying to survive her parents.