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This is a unique and surprisingly moving film. A family live in a desolate urban landscape, where their run-down house stands isolated among demolished rubble. The characters are relatively uncommunicative without being actually dysfunctional. Early on the father dies suddenly in the garden, and not long afterwards the mother dies at home as well. The children consist of an adolescent boy, Jack (Andrew Robertson) and a girl, Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who is a little younger, but emotionally more mature, a younger girl and a much younger boy, Tom (Ned Birkin). There have already been some scenes that looked as if they were going to develop into incestuous material between the elder two, but that didn't take place.
When the mother dies, the children decide to encase her body in concrete and carry on as normal. At this point I expected either a development of the practicalities of how to pay the bills, who is going to do the washing up and so on, or else a climax of the incestuous possibilities, but at first neither of these happens. However the youngest boy, Tom, has been bullied at school and has said he wishes he was a girl, because girls don't get hit.
The girls dress Tom as a girl, which he seems to find satisfying, but Jack bursts in on the scene, and feeling left out tries to make everyone feel awkward about it.
Afterwards Julie talks to him about this, challenging his reaction. This culminates in her saying, "Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it's OK to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you? What it feels like for a girl?"
Life goes on, and the only develpment is that a good-looking young man called Derek starts to take Julie out in his sports car. We never see what happens when they are out, although later Julie says she has never slept with him. The man turns out to be the manager for the contractors who are demolishing nearby houses. Tom seems to be dressed as a girl most of the time now.
There is a scene where Tom is sitting amongst the rubble with another little boy; Tom is dressed as a girl; Jack comes across them, and quizzes Tom; evidently the two of them have been in the habit of role-playing, as Tom's mother and father, or as Julie and Derek, or as Julie and Jack -- evidently all equated as couples by the small boy. Jack asks indirectly whether there is any sexual dimension to all this, but we don't get a definite answer.
The climax of the film is interesting and although the loose ends are not resolved, leaves you with the feeling of having witnessed a powerful set of events.
Its national origin is quoted as French and German because of the production and direction, but it is set in England and comes across as a very English film.
HF November 2007
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