PONETTE (71)

Directed by: Jacques Doillon

Starring: Victoire Thivisol, Xavier Beauvois, Delphine Schiltz

The Pitch: A four-year-old girl tries to come to terms with her mother's death.

Theo Sez: My comments re Welcome to the Dollhouse notwithstanding, it apparently is possible to evoke childhood accurately, at least if the kids involved are young enough for cultural variations to be irrelevant (4-year-olds are basically the same the world over) and if the film-makers don't try to explain too much but simply observe them in semi-documentary style. Which is not to say it doesn't feel staged occasionally, almost like an Our Gang short about pain, mortality and loss - or at least an achingly real core of pain, mortality and loss surrounded by the cutesy tomfoolery of Spanky and Co. ; what's more, it doesn't have the thrilling restlessness of beyond-easy-answers movies like LE GARCU - it's a rather old-fashioned arthouse film with a slightly stodgy feel (the heart sinks at those white-on-black opening credits, set to the lugubrious strains of a piano-and-string score) and a disappointingly pat, almost didactic ending. Yet the way it captures a feeling of being small and helpless and at the mercy of other people's incomprehensible, often contradictory explanations of a bewildering world is more wondrous than a whole slew of spectacular FX : whatever devious (maybe even exploitative) games Doillon had to play with his young cast to elicit these moments of purity, they're a perfect reminder of how movies, more than any other medium, can make abstractions (Childhood Innocence, say) tangible and specific, and offer us a glimpse of the unknowable. Transcendent stuff.