Ponette’s waiting for her mom.
It’s just a game.
No, she’s really waiting.
As this movie starts, Ponette, played by Victoire Thivisol, is a four-year-old girl whose mother has just tragically died in a car accident. The bulk of the movie focuses on Ponette as she’s shuffled around from relative to teacher to relative, struggling all the while to understand, well, on a macro level, what death even is and what it means that her mother is dead. Thivisol, herself only five, was given the prestigious Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance in this film and I think that’s worth talking about because I struggled a bit with the movie in terms of her performance. Namely, is she giving one? During filming, I think she probably was the same age as Ponette and I don’t know how to think about a four-year-old giving a performance. When she cries, and she cries a lot, is she “acting” sad or is she just sad? Is this a performance given by Thivisol or created by Doillon? Does it ultimately matter in terms of the film? I don’t know how I feel about any of that. My gut reaction is that this is a performance crafted by the director and I don’t know the degree to which there was a level of manipulation of Thivisol’s real emotions in order to do that. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I find it kind of intriguing that Thivisol basically retired from acting when she was fifteen (her final feature film was in 2008, though she has done a couple of shorts since then) and that, at least as far as I could find, she never really talked in any depth about her experience making Ponette. At this point, I reckon she doesn’t remember it, so the enigma of her “performance” is probably never going to be really solved to my satisfaction.
But does the movie work? Well, yes, it does. Because Thivisol has a very easy naturalism in front of the camera, which all by itself is worth a lot of praise, and whoever is ultimately responsible for performance in the emotional scenes in the movie, the performance does work and I felt a tremendous amount of empathy for Ponette. Thematically, the movie is about a lot of different things, but maybe more than anything else, it’s about the failure of adults to relate to children. Ponette’s grief looks a lot like confusion because that’s kind of what it is. She’s trying to understand the mixed messages she’s getting about her mother. An adult might tell her in one scene that her mother has gone away and won’t be coming back; mere minutes later, someone will throw a cliché like, “Your mother will always be with you” at her. Is her mother with God? Living in Ponette’s heart? Sleeping? Gone away, never to return? Returning to speak to Ponette in her dreams? The film really gets across the casual way adults talk to children in ways that they just don’t understand and the kind of mental and emotional turmoil that can cause. All of these adults are trying to help, but they’re trying to get Ponette to grasp the metaphysical elements of death when she doesn’t even really understand the physical mechanics of it.
This probably sounds like an emotionally heavy movie. It is. It’s very sad. But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the movie ends with hope. While Ponette doesn’t have the mental vocabulary to understand it, what she has kind of come to clarity about at the end of the movie is, well, how she should live her life without her mother there. It’s downright existential, but with Ponette being only four, what we see is the practical reality. She’s not a philosopher by the end, but she’s finally able to connect with another character in the film that is able to get through to her in a way she can both feel and understand. Through this interaction, she gains clarity; it’s really the only word that fits in my opinion. What she gains is the ability to literally move on; she no longer has to be constantly thinking about the fact that her mother is dead in an effort to understand it. I have to give the movie props for that particular scene because the character that finally gets through to Ponette isn’t the character I expected it to be. It was very surprising to me how they handled that, but it really worked for me. I think it would be a spoiler to tell you who it is; that’s how genuinely surprising it was to me. If you watch this movie, I want you to have that moment of surprise that I had, though I think some people might not like that scene as much as I did. Ultimately, the movie is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at both grief and childhood. The movie uses them to illuminate each other. By exploring grief, it gets at truths about the experience of childhood; by exploring a child’s perspective, it gets at truths about grief. If, as Shakespeare said, conscience makes cowards of us all, well, perhaps grief makes children of us all, uncertain, struggling, sorrowing, not understanding, but ultimately, hopefully, finding clarity that, even though we can’t put it into words, enables us to go on. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – thoughtful exploration of grief from a child’s perspective, Ponette is profoundly sad, but ultimately hopeful; compelling and beautiful. 3 ½ stars.