Little girl blue: A film of exceptional power (review)

Between documentary and auto-fiction, Mona Achache paints a vibrant portrait of her mother and the women in her family overwhelmed by a strange curse. Marion Cotillard delivers an incredible composition

“Sad little girl.” “Little Girl Blue” is this sublime song by Rogers and Hart which told the story of an unhappy kid, sitting in the rain, and having no one to rely on. Nina Simone, in her slow version of 59, as much an adult lament as a child’s nursery rhyme, gave it her heartbreaking solitude and her lived despair. But Mona Achache uses Janis Joplin’s ’69 version which gave her a raging brutality, burned with whiskey and LSD, rebellious, tender and runaway. It’s all this that irrigates his beautiful film. Little Girl Blue opens with a mountain of documents: letters, photos, notebooks, scattered around an apartment and gradually pinned to the wall by the filmmaker. It’s chaos. A life summarized in a puzzle of disparate and incoherent pieces. The editing is feverish. Between uneasiness and curiosity, Mona Achache unearths, a few years after her suicide, the story of her mother. And go back up the thread. Her grandmother, Monique Lange, screenwriter and writer, works at Gallimard and gravitates to the German-speaking galaxy (Genet, Semprun, etc.) where she trains her daughter, Carole Achache. At his own risk. And very quickly, chaos gives way to dizziness. The family story becomes that of a trauma which will be recomposed over three generations and which each woman transmits to the next. To ward off this infernal cycle, the director therefore decides to carry out its archeology and chooses to bring her mother back to life.

Enter the actress. Marion Cotillard rings the doorbell, invited to put herself in the shoes of the deceased mother. She must first wear clothes, a wig and lenses to get as close as possible to her model. She must then learn and recite found interviews in playback. Everything is permitted in this exercise of extreme appropriation (almost vampiric) and Mona Achache will first very scrupulously direct the star before, sometimes, being overtaken (by emotions as much as by the actress – who signs here her greatest performance for years). The family documentary then mutates into “Cotillard Movie” before going back and forth between these two extremes. And this won’t be the only crazy movement in this astonishing fresco. We will not recount here the successive discoveries that we make as we progress through this intertwining of memories. We will simply note that as in THE Daughters of Olfa, Little Girl Blue therefore mixes reconstruction and reality, recounts both the preparation and the execution of a fiction around the Achache women. While the word circulates and the archive images mingle with the reconstructions, taboos are dissolved, wounds come back from the past, monsters appear and invade this Haussmannian apartment which freezes, becoming at the same time a (Platonic) cave, a hiding place, a scene and the matrix of a long consoling dream.

MARION COTILLARD: “I REALLY HAD THE FEELING OF PLANNING THE FILM”

Despite the heavy conceptual device, emotion overwhelms everything as the initially whimsical mother transforms into a victim in poignant scenes. Film about a girl, but also about a woman, Little Girl Blue little by little takes the form of a larger essay on silence and curse. No doubt because the themes that animate it are powerful and powerfully expressed (curse of being a woman in a universe where man is king, curse of being the daughter of a character in tragedy to whom the repressions of the history) and that it closes with the feeling of a painful aporia. But above all it is a declaration of love for cinema. Because this reflection on memory, the ghosts that we carry and its dizzying device, recalls the power of this technique: recording traces or creating images that resist concealment or disappearance. In this exorcism film, Mona Achache responds with an accumulation of images, until she brings a dead woman back among the living. Balèze we tell you.

By Mona Achache. With Marion Cotillard, Marie Bunel, Marie-Christine Adam… Duration: 1h35. Released November 15, 2023