Das (Cooläss) Boot

"We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this."

Albert Schweitzer (1875 ~1965)

There is no doubt about it: we have had an amazingly fabulous run of movies for the past few weeks, and I am vastly relieved. Although we generally take turns in selecting them ~ and I'd already picked out the last two in a row (Into the Wild, followed by I Love You, Man) ~ Boy magnanimously told me to go nuts on Saturday afternoon and choose a third. Thrilled and thankful, and without waiting for him to change his mind lest we come home with something either too permanently scarring (Irréversible) or auteur for me (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover... again), I perused the shelves at our local library and picked out the one depicted above based on the following criteria:

• there was a pseudo-Gothic cast to the aesthetic quality of the cover, thus hinting at something potentially very cool and brooding indeed;
  
• it was French, which often lends a film an appreciable unconventionality and very non-Hollywood ending;
  
• it was in French, so I had a chance to practice my language comprehension while physically blocking out the subtitles for myself with a book;
  
• its cinematography was done by Benoît Debie (Irréversible), and won Best Cinematography at the Stockholm Film Festival.
  
• Boy's only dictum was that it had to be strange. I suspected I might've had the perfect candidate when the blurb on the back described the premise as "a fascinating fable about a mysterious boarding school for girls, where one arrives by coffin to an enclosed, highly-regimented universe of botany classes, ballet, and playtime. A world both compelling and ominious unfolds as six-year-old Iris watches time pass and girls disappearing one by one."

Fortunately, he didn't hate it. At all.

The film opens in a sphere of deaf submersion, a plugged aquatic world of static and silence. Then, before the tension and disorientation become insurmountable, we bubble up almost violently into a chaotic universe where water is rushing so intensely and vivaciously it could be easily be taken for a mass exodus of sperm making their passage from one form to another, to transfigure in perfect combination with another entity to create a new life.

Awash in Biblical symbolism and aglow with startlingly uneasy beauty, Innocence is one of those films that haunts one's consciousness for days, weeks, months... years. Based upon "Mine-Haha, or the Corporeal Education of Girls" ~ a German novella by Frank Wedekind ~ writer/director Lucile Hadzihalilovic's cinematic adaptation is breathtakingly lovely to behold while never dropping obvious hints about what events may follow... although the viewer's suspicions are as correct ~ or incorrect ~ as one can naturally assume in what Boy aptly described as an art-house film. ("Stunning" and "creepy" would also be entirely appropriate adjectives.)

Already notorious for the use of her own children in a photographic series derided by critics as being both pornographic and paedophilic, Hadzihalilovic again refuses to be shut down in her relevant expressionism of childhood innocence and unwitting grace. And dismiss the fact that her husband, Gaspar Noé, directed Irréversible, potentially the most shocking and disturbing movie to date; Newsweek reported, "If outraged viewers (mostly women) at the Cannes Film Festival are any indication, this will be the most walked-out-of movie of 2003." Hadzihalilovic makes her points about the mysteries of life and maturation in a relentlessly dogged fashion, albeit in a gentler, more subdued manner. If Irréversible is a Wagnerian opera infused with inescapable intensity and accented with erratically pulsing lights, then Innocence is a Debussian water ballet done in deep hues of emerald, gold, and midnight. While the film may justifiably be viewed as somewhat fetishist, we might do well to examine our own conceptions of pre-pubescent nudity, genuine naïvité, and indeed, unadulterated innocence. And to be absolutely honest and fair, there is nothing to fear; it is a gorgeous, sensitive piece where everything makes perfect sense in the end.

Fascinatingly enough, the only music you hear is source music, not incidental (therefore, anything heard is contained within the visual context and not superimposed in post-production), thus fostering an intensely intimate realism. Shot in a similarly contemplative, haltingly pensive manner as The Shining, there are countless moments where you are seized with abject fear and foreboding for the beguiling young girls, and for good reason:

Life is a universal mystery. And while curiosity can take some to their doom and obedience may lead to stomach-curdling agony, focussing our energies on daily rituals might sometimes be the salvation upon which we need to cling before we eventually realize our true destinies. As an allegory for metamorphosis and self-fulfilment, Innocence is one such ominously glorious realization. If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it.

And not just because I covet the super cool Doc-like boots worn by the boarding school girls. Really.