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Ponette

By Spencer Ross

Generally, I don't watch too many foreign films, so for me to review one is a little out of the ordinary, especially after the 2 1/2 star Germinal that we watched over December break. Yesterday, however, we watched this movie made in 1996 called Ponette, and I must say, it topped any other movie I think we've watched in French class (well other than the guy whipping it out and taking a piss on the old man in Ridicule hehe :)) I thought Ponette was a decent story that actually deserved 4 1/2 stars. Jacques Doillon writes and directs this story of a four year old girl whose mother dies in a car accident. The girl, Ponette (Victoire Thivisol- who was actually four years old at the time of shooting in '96), tries to cope with the grief of the death.

Ponette wakes up in a hospital bed with a broken arm and is then shown being wisked away in a car by her father(Xavier Beauvois). The father calls the mother stupid, that she knew the road by heart and should have been wearing the seatbelt. He virtually blames the accident on the mother and when he and Ponette get out of the car, he asks her to swear and spit on the fact that she'll never die. I thought it was an interesting way that the father tried to deal with the death of the mother, not to mention the fact that he basically tries to elimiate emotion from his daughter's loss. We don't really see a funeral, however we see Ponette and her cousins Matiaz(Matiaz Bureau Caton) and Delphine(Delphine Schiltz) talking in front of a hearse. Matiaz often refers to the fact that the bodies will never come back. Ponette spends the movie hoping her mother will come back. This movie is not an action movie, however it tries to get inside the minds of kids and portray how the kids would cope with the death. The kids themselves have different takes on what will happen of her mother. The aunt(Claire Nebout) talks about how Jesus was born but he died and came back to life. Ponette, who believes her mother is talking to her at night, starts to wonder when she'll see her mother alive. Matiaz and Delphine try magic words but they don't work. She and her cousins go to a boarding school and Ponette appears to fit in okay, but it is quite obvious that she is still grieving for her mother and waiting for her mother to come back. After a boy on the playground insists Ponette's mother died because she was mean, Ponette declares to Matiaz that she either wants to kill the boy or kill herself. Another girl, Carla(Carla Ibled) tries to convince Ponette that Ada, the Jewish girl, is a Child of God and therefore can communicate with God directly. Ada has some weird trips and she makes Ponette go through all these "trials" to become a Child of God. I found it highly interesting how the kids talked about religion, particularly the differences between Catholics and Jews and Arabs...You could tell that the kids were really naive about matters of religion. Ponette ends up running away from the school and goes to the cemetary to the grave of her mother and her mother comes back to see her. It was a rather shocking ending since we never would have suspected it due to the fact that it seemed unrealistic. I think for Ponette, it seemed to bring closure to her mother's death, even if she knew that the mother would never come back to life.

As a story, there really wasn't much of one, except that it showed how a child might go about dealing with death, which is something that must be particularly hard to do. The actors and actresses were great in this movie, playing their parts convincingly well for four year olds. The emotions ran rather high, particularly in Ponette who had the greatest part of all in trying to find her peace. Victoire Thivisol must have worked really hard to memorize the lines and act in this performance and the fact that she won "Best Actress" at the Venice Film Festival would show for it. The film has also won five other awards. The cinematography was excellent as well as the outdoor shots were set up really well with all kinds of lighting effects and different types of shots. I would only imagine that getting four year olds to stay still and patient for some of the shots to be rather difficult. Some of the scenes were done in long takes without cuts, and I'm sure that was no easy challenge to pull off either. Overall though, it was a great movie that was made really convincingly.

3/8/00