Customer Reviews

Innocence

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I happened upon this film on YouTube last week and rented it from Netflix.
This is a film about an exclusive private boarding ballet school in an English speaking country that could nevertheless be, and most likely is, found in many nations of the world, especially the Russian Federation, where people are passionate about ballet as they are nowhere else. The cost of educating and training this small group of girls in the basic academic arts and dance is offset by the revenues of recitals the girls put on periodically at an old opera house nearby. Since the fate of the school is tied completely to the success of the recitals, the shows must please their demanding audiences: the girls must not only dance perfectly but look like angels, maintaining perfect figures dressed in white. They are permitted to roam the extensive grounds of their school so long as they do not leave.
That ballet companies can be unforgiving with the rare people suited to their art and that the perfectionism demanded by many dance teachers has driven many students to depression, anorexia, and suicide are cliches. The girls at this school know they cannot leave, so they do not dwell on the injustices meted out by their teachers, but all but the most beautiful and successful entertain fantasies about leaving that often surface as nightmares. Those who act out these fantasies meet differing outcomes.
Although sequestering girls away from males may be necessary to to enable some of them to dance without embarrassment or fear, it is the rare girl that is willing to forego knowledge for the privilege. When the girls run away, it is with the audience's understanding and approval. The prettiest and most talented, on the other hand, find protection at the school and become the school's leaders, knowing they are too young to handle the many attentions of boys they would be sure to meet "outside". When they finally undergo puberty, these "survivors" are taken to the nearby city and neatly deposited at a city fountain, where their unselfconscious willingness to splash in white dresses up to their underwear inevitably draws the attention of boys nearby, who will now teach them about love at precisely the moment when love is most magical and sublime. The system works, but only for the elite: those patient enough to wait out the long ordeal.
Let's be as clear about the film as the film is trying to be clear about girls: This movie is not pornography by any stretch. There is no nudity or sex whatsoever, and shots of girls dressing for ballet or playing on the lawn lack all manner of prurience. This is a film about what it feels like to be a girl on the cusp of adolescence, before hormones make them "boy crazy". What it feels like, more than anything else, is warm and scared and companionable. There are, in fact, no males on this campus, nor need there be, since the film makes clear that girls of this age do not understand sexual differentiation and, what's more, do not care to.
"Innocence" often drags, much as childhood often drags, but it is a visually beautiful film united by a handful of appropriate motifs, water for libido, snow for chastity and purity, rare color for the few reminders of time and aging the girls live with. A riveting film it is not; a sincere and sometimes clinical exploration of feminine coming of age it most certainly is, with the appeal of music and ballet thrown in.
BTW there is really only one fantastic aspect in the film, but it is easily explained and completely in agreement with the film's theme: the girls leave and arrive in coffins. In light of the above it should be obvious what this conceit means: these girls must be "dead" to the sexuality within them for as long as they remain there; their sexuality is directed not to members of the opposite gender but to their ballet's audience. This sexual numbness may be especially common to children raised only among members of their own sex. In its celebration of the grace and beauty of youth, "Innocence" calls for a new era of sublimation of youthful sexual energies, specifically dance, while acknowledging that such sublimation may be impossible and even undesirable for all but the most beautiful and talented of young people among us.

Seriously, I don't know what Home Vision did to this film, as it is the dvd image renders it almost unwatchable. There's just too much combing (when a progressive image is made out of an interlaced one and the image gets "videodromey" whenever there's more movement onscreen).

Being a movie about children, every time they would go out to play and dance around the school, there was some crazy "The Ring"-like effect because of the bad encoding, I thought the children where getting out of the TV to kill me, completely took me out of the story.

This is a beautiful film. The storyline is open to your own interpretation. I watched this over a week ago and I cannot stop thinking of different possible answers, yet the storyline isn't that complicated. I loved the actors, for such a young age, they all did an excellent job. This film is set in a park with lots of beautiful green scenery.

There is a suspenseful and dark tone to this film like something awful is going to happen, however, the end result is something that I didn't expect. I loved the eerie feel of the outdoor wall lights attached to the trees along the path that the older girls walked on at night. My favorite scene is when the schoolgirls are dancing, swinging, and playing in the forest with classical music in the background, it really reminded me of my childhood, where you simply enjoyed playing with no drama or tension. If you like slow and thoughtful movies, give it a try.

The great Robert Bresson always regreted the films had to be accompained by words. He regarded them useless, since the cinema is strictly a visual art.

I bring up this previous comment, because Innocence is a film that easily could do without the words. The visuals talk by themselves, the beauty of nature confronted with the isolation from the outer world around these little girls who are forced to abandon their team once they reach 12, with a violet ribbon on her hair.

Its intimate style prefigures a minimalist portrait about the dreams, hopes and vanished illusions of this bunch of little girls who are brought up without feelings under the most strict rules of obedience and severe discipline.

The final is opened, leaving it to us to judge and meditate. Superb photography despite its slow paced rhtym.

Marion Cotillard once more chews the scenery.

I would rate this zero star if not one. Not worth a cent and would never recommend this movie. Can I have my money back?

There have been a number of interpretations about this film. I guess the important thing is to contribute... Anyway, soon after it was over, I had the same feeling that overtook me during it's entirety, which was uncertainty. It took almost one day for the meaning of it to permeate through my mind and help me discern what was being shown. I truly dismiss any claims pertaining to lewd or inappropriate images... whatever abstract version of reality was being amplified, it drew me in perfectly. It was a very powerful allegory of modern life. Freedom is a myth, that's common-place. However, we continue to live one day after the next as if there weren't strings controlling our movements. We play within our confines. Such is this movie... there are walls, there is a hierarchy, discipline is enforced. They arrive at a young age, albeit in a coffin (already deceased). And they dance... Perfection is not demanded of them, the act is the goal. As the oldest girls move across the stage every night, the shadows of the spectators loom in the background as demons foreseeing perverse omens... Very poignant. I guess people lose their innocence early on in life, more and more prematurely in an exponential fashion, especially in this western hyperactive, hypersexual environment we have created. But I guess the damaged minds of the ones overseeing our children are the true monsters... no matter how secluded and whisked away the upbringing may take place, there is no escape from the wretched mold children are shaped with... they dance, and the genuine innocence in their actions is oblivious to what they are inexorably being groomed to become, even if it is only suggested in the subtext of the film. As we view the chronology of their time in this alternative reality, all becomes clear. However, seeing purity in its quintessential form, and then its slow death at the hands of those who are blind to its light, can become quite unbearable. Anyway, I recommend this film (not that my recommendation means anything), if for no other reason than to show us a mirror of the running-towards-the-mousetrap philosophy reigning over our world, perpetuating our frustrations by psychotic projective identification, murdering off the beauty of future generations as if it would erase our own erroneous undertakings throughout our insipid existence.

If there is a plot to this movie, my wife and I missed it. However, it does have the capacity to keep one fascinated with the movie, always hoping that something by the end will tie everything together to make watching it a satisfying experience. There are just too many unanswered aspects of this movie to make it seem to have been worth watching as far as 'story' goes. The first question is how and why are the girls chosen to go to the 'school.' My wife kept wondering why no parents ever seemed to show any concern about their daughter. Could it be that each class was groomed for perfection for one to be chosen for some pagan human sacrifice at puberty? We never know. So, we are left to wonder for what purpose such a school existed.

It also seemed a bit curious to me that the girls always seemed to wear their panties, even in the bathroom scenes and when they went swimming in the lake. I'm old enough to remember when the YMCA required all the boys to swim naked if they used the pool. In an all-girl, little girl, setting such as this school, it would seem that nudity would be natural. [There is one scene where 12-year-old Bianca gets out of the tub and you see her fully naked reflection in the mirror; but she is alone.] For a movie entitled 'Innocence' it seemed interesting that the ultimate prepubescent innocence was avoided.

At the end of the movie, the oldest girls are taken by train to Paris. We never know why. For the first time in years the girls observe children laughing and playing like normal kids, a stark contrast to the almost militaristic lives they've led. We don't know from the story if this is just a 'field trip' or if the older women had just left them to fend for themselves. Whatever the reason, the girls soon 'revert' from their picture-perfect selves to normal kids. Is the message of the movie that, underneath, kids are really children no matter how regimented adults make their lives? I would not presume to make any such judgments for you; you'll just have to watch the movie and try to figure out what, if any, meaning it has.

German expressionist writer Frank Wedekind's symbolist novella "Mini-Haha: The Corporal Education of Young Girls" (1888) is the basis for this film, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It takes place in a girls' school for affluent students, who arrive in a coffin, one by one, and who are not allowed to leave. (Anyone who tries to leave has to stay there forever, and become one of the old women who are servants to the current girls.) Marion Cotillard plays one of the two teachers, Eva, a ballet teacher; she is often moved to tears. The other teacher is a science teacher, who has a limp. The girls are always dressed in white. Is this beginning to sound like a dream sequence to you? The girls wear colored ribbons to denote their seniority; some of the older girls are eventually taken by train to a city, presumably (but never guess outcome in a dream) to attend another school. The film is admirably discussed on the DVD in two interviews with the director, who declines to "explain" what is happening here. Suffice it to say that this film does not respect chronology or explanation. Like other of Wedekind's works, it exists, and was created, to be absorbed rather than "understood," much as looking at a great painting is assisted by the viewer's openhearted acceptance of the effort. Not for everyone, but an interesting look at Cotillard's choices in her early career -- how the girls' freedom is always tinged with the oppressiveness of their days. Cotillard has a great line: "Obedience is the only path to happiness." Perhaps Wedekind was remarking on the way children were raised in his day. Perhaps the director is remembering her days growing up in an oppressive country in the l960s. It's all up to the viewer.

Like the very best gothic fairy tales, the film submerges us in an innovative, surreal aesthetic that evokes coming of age. The startling imagery (watery expanses alternately placid and violent, blood-bright ribbons and whitest uniforms) and cryptic but highly suggestive narrative hover between beauty and menace, embroidering a delicate, deadly spiderweb ambience. The shimmering magic and terrors of childhood and pubescence, which coil just beneath consciousness, are given phantasmatic form in sequences that suggest the permeability of boundaries we'd prefer to think staunch. Safety and danger, innocence and perversion, bodily resilience and fragility, nature's loveliness and destructiveness all bleed into each other. Is the girls' school a nurturing haven or site of sinister machinations? Will the "outside" proffer the escape into liberty or unnameable new horrors? How can we understand "birth" and "death", is the coffin from which new arrivals spring also a sort of womb, are new life stages necessarily also a deathly adieu to what came before, a rite initiated in blood? For what are the best girls "chosen," and is that good or bad? The unforgettable sequence in which the preteen butterflies are ushered through an enormous grandfather clock to dance for an audience that we gradually discern comprises older male figures is appalling in the most subtle of ways, staging the dangers and vulnerable joys that beat, intertwined, at the heart of female pubescence. Reverberations of Angela Carter, Brothers Quay, Peter Weir, Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, yes, but there's an idiosyncratic, chilling yet oddly uplifting magic all its own here.

I didn't make very far into this film - either the encoding is absolutely off or it was filmed with a cheap DV camera. There's some strange video (de-?)interlacing/combining going on that creates a horrible jerky blur around any movement. The reviewer who said it renders the movie unwatchable is right. What looked to be an interesting movie was completely ruined by shoddy image quality.