Innocence takes place in a mysterious boarding school by a lake, immersed in a haunting, lush forest. Inside, the girls receive biology and dance lessons, swim, and play. They have no idea why they've been sent there, and have no idea when they will be leaving. Mademoiselle Edith and Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard)
are in charge. With subtlety, in this blurry and dark environment, they teach the girls about life and music, perparing them for the reality of the outside world.
Iris, Alice, and Bianca are the protagonists of this story (all excellent actresses), young girls surviving the long rite of passage that is their stay in the institute. Iris, the newcomer, adapts to the mysterious system of the school, and gets used to the idea that she may not be going out in a very long time. Alice struggles to become the best dancer in her class in order to be chosen by the headmistress, and be able to leave the Institute earlier. Bianca is on her final year, readying to leave the fairy-tale woods and return to the "real" world she's probably forgotten.
The beauty of Innocence is that we as spectators realize that this is just a school! Nothing abnormal is going on, the girls are not being mistreated or abused; in fact, they live in an idyllic place with all commodities at their disposal. Therefore, why are the girls so afraid of it, why does verything seem so mysterious and forbidding? Lucile Hadzihalilovic tries to take us back to the time when we used to be amazed at everything, when all things were new to us, when there was still an element of magic or surprise to life. The truth is that this is a school that prepares potential ballerinas, but to the students it is the entire world, and so everything inside it has a special, larger-than-life significance.
The film is meandering, contemplative, and above all intimate. The cinematography is breathtaking, and the slow pace of the plot is absolutely hypnotizing. In a way, there are many "clues" and symbols throughout the film, but it would be useless to try to explain them now: Innocence is very open to interpretation, and the waters definitely run deeper than what I was able to explain.
The film is difficult to categorize, but there is some terror to it: the woods, so still and yet so overflowing with movement and hidden life, are metaphors of what the students are going through... that terrifying, confusing time when "girls become women", to say it lightly, that sort of "being on the edge" of full metamorphoses, something unknown (and therefore menacing) happening inside that can't be identified from outside.
Hadzihalilovic is a brilliant symbolist. Her film plays like a poem, and it's full of images of gushing water and stillness and movement in nature. She closes the movie with one of the most intelligent and sensible scenes I have ever seen, in which everything has an implicit meaning, with bubbling water, laughter, and a not-so-little girl having the first taste of freedom, taking a vague first look at what the future has in store, at what she has been so thoroughly prepared for as far as her memory can go.
June 24, 2008
Top Critic
