This is a movie to celebrate: it simmers with emotional nakedness. We have here one of the beautiful stories about first love and the pain of unfair separation. All other teenage love stories are crushed by comparison. Susan Swan's novel is so flattered by Léa Pool's direction that one begins to believe that this director could take anyone's high school diary to the screen with award-winning results. Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré, and Mischa Barton can start clipping their performances for highlight reels -- they are excellent by any standard, and they are consistently good from beginning to end. Jessica Paré is delectably in bloom, as required by the script, and from Mischa Barton we require only the deepest sensitivity ever found in a wide-eyed 14-year old actress. An Oscar for Piper! I have never heard Shakespeare recited with so much power, even as the movie departs from storytelling and descends (or rises?) into a visual representation of Paulie's emotional state.
Here is where the movie crosses from simple sweetness to vignettes of Pauline in rage. It's where a lot of viewers get lost, for if you are unable to connect to Paulie emotionally at this point, you will not appreciate the movie. Like a poem, the path is barred to those who will not think with the heart. I try to read a lot of teenage girls' poetry in high school literary magazines because when you chance upon a good one, it absolves all of the bad poetic sins of others, and even validates the form. You simply can't find the same emotions in polished literary magazines, so you must wade through the almost-beautiful teenage love poems until you find a really good one. The same is true here. It's bare emotion, and it's going to stand or fall on Ms. Perabo's openness to Paulie's raw feelings, and on our openness to both. The movie remains set among tea parties on long greens at the edge of an arboretum in diffuse light; Derek Jarman's Edward II was a similar exploration of this emotional state, but Mr. Jarman had available a black dungeon, point light, and a bleeding carcass to set the angry mood. Mr. Jarman's film was mature cinematic art, with all its pretense and self-awareness. Ms. Pool's film is visually naive by comparison: the serendipity of an honest page in a girl's diary where someone wept while she wrote. I believe the latter can be a finer art.
One last observation. The huge list of Montreal-French contributors to the movie must have had something to do with its success. While this Canadian movie has a distinct North American look, it aspires to the subtlety of a French contemplation on life. On the one hand, if the cast had paired a young Isabelle Adjani and Emanuelle Béart under the direction of a Claude Sautet, would anyone have questioned the splendidness of emotional candor? On the other hand, if a purely French crew had made the film, could it have been as politically brazen, bravely inevitable, and downright unambiguous at the end? One can even imagine Paulie as a Native American orphan, her bird-spirit so central to the film's symbols and characterization. Here is a lovely film, a beautiful film, and perhaps for French-Canadian cinema, even a landmark film. Recommended.
Here is where the movie crosses from simple sweetness to vignettes of Pauline in rage. It's where a lot of viewers get lost, for if you are unable to connect to Paulie emotionally at this point, you will not appreciate the movie. Like a poem, the path is barred to those who will not think with the heart. I try to read a lot of teenage girls' poetry in high school literary magazines because when you chance upon a good one, it absolves all of the bad poetic sins of others, and even validates the form. You simply can't find the same emotions in polished literary magazines, so you must wade through the almost-beautiful teenage love poems until you find a really good one. The same is true here. It's bare emotion, and it's going to stand or fall on Ms. Perabo's openness to Paulie's raw feelings, and on our openness to both. The movie remains set among tea parties on long greens at the edge of an arboretum in diffuse light; Derek Jarman's Edward II was a similar exploration of this emotional state, but Mr. Jarman had available a black dungeon, point light, and a bleeding carcass to set the angry mood. Mr. Jarman's film was mature cinematic art, with all its pretense and self-awareness. Ms. Pool's film is visually naive by comparison: the serendipity of an honest page in a girl's diary where someone wept while she wrote. I believe the latter can be a finer art.
One last observation. The huge list of Montreal-French contributors to the movie must have had something to do with its success. While this Canadian movie has a distinct North American look, it aspires to the subtlety of a French contemplation on life. On the one hand, if the cast had paired a young Isabelle Adjani and Emanuelle Béart under the direction of a Claude Sautet, would anyone have questioned the splendidness of emotional candor? On the other hand, if a purely French crew had made the film, could it have been as politically brazen, bravely inevitable, and downright unambiguous at the end? One can even imagine Paulie as a Native American orphan, her bird-spirit so central to the film's symbols and characterization. Here is a lovely film, a beautiful film, and perhaps for French-Canadian cinema, even a landmark film. Recommended.