Product Description

Gushing water. Subterranean rumbling. Sun-dappled green vistas behind huge stone walls. So begins Innocence, a fascinating fable about a mysterious school for girls, where one arrives by coffin to a self-enclosed, highly regimented universe of botany classes, ballet and playtime. The journey from girl to womanhood and the dangers and perils contained therein has rarely, if ever, been explored in a more creative manner than in this intoxicating feature by acclaimed film director Lucile Hadzihalilovic. With stunning cinematography by Benoit Debie (Irreversible, Calvaire), a world both compelling and ominous unfolds as six-year-old Iris watches time pass and girls disappearing one by one...

Starring Marion Cotillard, the acclaimed actress who portrays Edith Piaf in the hit foreign film, La Vie en Rose.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39634 in DVD
• Brand: IMAGE ENT.
• Released on: 2007-11-13
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 120 minutes

Features

• Gushing water. Subterranean rumbling. Sun-dappled green vistas behind huge stone walls. So begins Innocence, a fascinating fable about a mysterious school for girls, where one arrives by coffin to a self-enclosed, highly regimented universe of botanyes, ballet and playtime. The journey from girl to womanhood and the dangers and perils contained therein has rarely, if ever, been explored in a mo

Customer Reviews

Interesting for Marion Cotillard fans....
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.

Fine-Spun Macabre Cinematic Magic
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.

Heart-breaking
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.