San Sebastian Dispatch. 3.

The latest surprise from Zabaltegi section has come in the form of an adult tale starring almost exclusively young girls. Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence is not a perfect movie - it's even more pretentious than Mike Figgis's latest outings, and it's overlong, and derivative. But Hadzihalilovic's unusual film - apparently, she and agent provocateur Gaspar Noé are an item - arouses a sense of risk, even danger sadly missing in the vast majority of selections at the festival, and that's something to appreciate.

Innocence is a place. The film centers on life in a school for girls which serves as a handy metaphor for, yes, innocence. The always painful passage from infancy to adolescence is presented in the form of a quasi-Victorian tale with hints of the supernatural - young girls learning the facts of life through a series of symbolic accidents, meetings and various objects at play. The idea is simple, of course, and it falls flat in the middle of the race - when it begins to feel like a short film obliged to be a long one. But the filmmaking is, nonetheless, utterly fascinating, mixing Lynchian claustrophobia with the floating magic of fairy tales for an intense cinematic experience.

A lot of people walked out of this screening. Hopefully, they had something much better to do. And hopefully, they weren't the same people who cheered the sloppy, pedantic Roma, currently ringing in as a favorite of the official section. More notes to come from San Sebastian.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2004 6:09 AM