Innocence

2004 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Girls grow up in a boarding school where they learn to dance.

This is another Lucile Hadzihalilovic flick, and it's a good companion piece to Evolution. The characters at the center of all this are pre-pubescent girls. In Evolution, it's boys. Like Evolution, this bewilders poetically, intentionally leaving loose threads and remaining open to interpretation. I think the symbolism and meaning of this one might be a little more obvious, however. That's not to say I actually understood this completely because I didn't. But with caterpillars, walls, legs, and trains, it felt a little more explicit. The movie's frequently without dialogue, and along with the deliberate pace, it leaves you a lot of space to collect your thoughts. It's frequently beautiful, especially in opening and closing shots of swirly water. You're given plenty of opportunities to recognize recurring images and ideas and try to piece it all together into something that makes sense.

Structurally, there's three parts to the story. The first is with a new arrival to the boarding school. New arrivals show up in a coffin for some reason, and after some colored ribbon exchanging, we follow that little girl around as she gets acclimated to her new surroundings and learns what her new home is all about. At the same time, the viewer gets acclimated to this new environment, one that feels very familiar and at the same time completely strange. Then, there's a shift to an older girl who wants to be selected to leave the boarding school by the woman who comes along and selects one of them for that. Then, there's a new main character, one of the oldest girls, who is just about ready to move on from the boarding school. It's an interesting way to show the audience what this place means at different stages in a girl's life without having them follow or even care that much about one character.

The style is detached, cold and clinical. Along with the way this movie takes its time to get anywhere, I can imagine that would be really frustrating for a lot of people. Fans of enigmatic cinema, however, would probably really enjoy this. I'm not sure I want to guess what Hadzihalilovic's actual intentions were. If they were to paint a picture of the emotions that a girl goes through when becoming a woman, I think it might be fairly successful. I don't know if that was it though.

I've started to hate writing about movies like this and Evolution. I feel like these write-ups are even worse than the normal things I write. I need to stick to disaster movies, I guess.

I'm not going to proofread this. If you make a typo in a forest, and there's nobody around to read it, does it make a sound?