Week #14: Innocence
A woman is standing on a beach, watching a bather slowly make his way to shore. She stands by his towel and they strike up a conversation once he is on dry land. He’s on holiday from the Czech Republic and she’s interested about why he’s chosen to come to Scotland, of all places. Before long, distant screams call them away. We see first a woman ducking under the waves, unable to catch her dog. Then a man runs in to assist, before being joined by our swimmer. The bather drags the exhausted man back to shore, but before long he’s started out again, desperate, against the odds, to save the woman. The bather lies prone, spent in the low tide. Our woman comes and clubs him on the head, dragging his body across the beach, revealing the drowned couple’s baby, an angry but impotent god, screaming his lungs out from the safety of the high beach. Our woman continues dragging, offering the baby not even a look.
This scene in Under the Skin is the pivotal moment where the film pushes our sense of the alien (a moment where more than a few people decided to step off the merry-go-round). Scarlett Johansson’s Glasgow-bothering alien sits outside of either cruelty or compassion. The baby is simply as consequential as the rocks that surround it on the beach. Yet, even through the protecting double distance of fiction and the logic within the film, it is hard to disabuse ourselves of our perspective. This crack in the ice is the line the film walks, between our own innate preconceptions and our protagonist's complete alienation from them.
So too with Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Innocence (2004). As the film starts, we follow the progress of a small wooden coffin through dank brick tunnels, hidden beneath lush woodland. The coffin is deposited inside a boarding house and six girls in blistering whites gather around it. They lift the lid and inside is a small girl, blinking awake. This is the start of Iris’s induction into this strange, all-female boarding school. Here, in holy sunlight or perpetual dusk, she joins the ranks of girls who never see a male soul, their ages clearly delineated by corresponding hair ribbons, shockingly bright against the muted yellows of the houses and ivy-encrusted forests. We watch a complete cycle of the year, as Iris moves from initial doubt of her new circumstances, to acceptance and love of her new classmates, living in an idyll of endless summer. As the year progresses, our focus shifts to Bianca, the oldest girl in her boarding house, ready to matriculate beyond the school’s bounds. They must prepare to perform a ballet for a shadowy audience. At the end of the year they board an underground railroad that leads them into the outside world, where they are deposited without supervision, facing an utterly uncertain future with the curiosity of children who have never known want.
So why is Innocence a provocative film? Even though it is dedicated to Hadžihalilović's husband Gaspar Noé it is not a replete with his signature rape scenes, 3D ejaculate or tedious DMT-inspired trips to meet the godhead. Its tone is reflective and open. Yet, almost immediately after I posted on Twitter that I was going to write about the film, someone involved in its original UK release privately messaged me to tell me how they had thought the film an interesting experiment but had never dreamed that it would bring out of the woodwork the ‘deeply strange, creepy and disturbed’ audience it gathered. To be honest, I was sad to hear it. That something you hold dear is an object of interest for the sexually depraved is hard to countenance. For removal of doubt, Innocence shows young girls swimming, dancing and playing, occasionally in a state of undress (just as they often are in real life). Starting to pull at this thread begins to unsettle. The year after Innocence’s release (capitalising perhaps on author Frank Wedekind’s novel slipping out of copyright) another adaptation, a sleazy softcore film The Fine Art of Love, was released. Noé and Hadžihalilović’s first film together La Bouche de Jean-Pierre culminates with an attempted act of child abuse, which changes the experience of viewing Innocence. One senses Noé’s hand more firmly at play here. Paedophilia is a highly contentious subject in France (French theorists’ thoroughgoing support of the elimination of age of consent laws makes fairly sickening reading), one whose repercussions are only now being addressed. Liberté of expression is a French core value; unlike the equally free speech obsessed United States, it is not counter-balanced by bedrock puritanism.
Of course, the film is asking you to set aside these notions and anxieties. Innocence is its title and its viewpoint. This is not like the paintings of Balthus, which hides in plain sight its sexualisation of children. It’s very easy to watch the film outside of concerns for the children on screen. Watched from one angle, it has more in common with Nicolas Philibert’s Être et Avoir than with Enter the Void, a rediscovery of the unaffected behaviour of children and their shockingly direct contact with their emotions.
Its genius lies in how closely it situates itself to fairy tale. This is not a work of psychological realism (although the performances are charmingly unpretentious), but one that cuts to the quick of fairy tale's unsettling undercurrents, the Grimm truths. That Disney was able to adapt these works into something so appropriate for children (barring the occasional scarring trip into Snow White’s forest) shows that they have one face, a side that can be shown when not joined to deeper, darker knowledge. At one point in Innocence, one of the girls is tossed a red rose from an audience member, which she cherishes. The implications of this token aren’t knowable, but they have teeth sharp enough to gobble Little Red Riding Hood. But that’s for us to bring our own assumptions to. Most provocative cinema is overdetermined, making for a frustrating watch if your buttons cannot be pushed as the film intends. Innocence instead provokes you by its refusal to offer easy answers, leaving you alone with how far you may have strayed from an unjaded viewpoint.
Recommendations
If you’re in the mood for something enjoyably light but suitably absorbing, you can watch Breakdown starring Kurt Russell on Netflix. Plays like a junior league version of The Vanishing. Read Guy Lodge’s appreciation of it here.
Zia Anger is performing live streams of her performance My First Film. You’ll need to follow her on Twitter and turn on notifications for when she tweets to get in as each performance has limited attendance. It’s well worth it to watch someone own their own failure and alchemise it into something positive.
The novels of Charles Portis make great lock down reading. Best known for writing the novel of True Grit (which is terrific and tops the mordant humour of the Coens' adaptation), his other novels Norwood and Dog of the South have the half-baked, deadpan joy of the best of Kurt Vonnegut.
While I wrote this essay, I listened to The KLF’s Chill Out album. Enjoyable itself, it’s only better when accompanied by the stoner saudade of the Youtube comments.