Sometimes we encounter movies that seem to have been made by someone spying on our own lives. When we do, our reaction to the film is colored by our feelings about the corresponding events or issues that we've experienced personally. Watching Ponette, last night, was that kind of experience for me. The film is about a four-year-old girl (which, by the way, I am not) recovering from an automobile accident in which her mother was driving. The accident soon claims the life of the mother and leaves Ponette with only minor physical injuries but a great big gaping hole in her psychological support system. Ponette will now grow up under the care of her father, with a bit of help from the extended family. The superficial elements of this story are the same as what occurred in my life back in 1970. My two-year-old daughter and my wife were in a car accident in which my wife was driving (I was two states away at the times). My wife was killed immediately but my daughter survived with only minor injuries but a big gaping hole in her psychological support system. I became my daughter's only parent, receiving some help, now and then, from her mother's extended family. Ponette's father, in the film, is an atheist; I am an atheist. Ponette's male cousin's name in the film is "Mathias" (in the anglicized subtitles); my son's name is "Matthias." Beyond those particulars, however, nothing about the story of Ponette matches the experience that my daughter and I had as we dealt with our loss and moved on with life. Ponette is a film about the inadequacies in how children are raised, in many instances, and especially when they have to cope with loss through sudden, unanticipated death. I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't have to be as it is depicted in the film. This film is a lesson in what not to do!

Historical Background: Ponette was directed by Frenchman Jacques Doillon. Doillon has worked as both a director and a screenwriter. When he directs, he typically also writes his own scripts, sometimes in conjunction with Jean-François Goyet. After gaining experience as an assistant film editor, Doillon made his first feature film, L'An 01, in 1972. Since then, he has averaged about four films per decade. Ponette (1996) is his best known work. His films are highly idiosyncratic and typically deal obliquely with difficult themes. Consequently, his films tend to be inaccessible for mass audiences.

The Story: The story opens with Ponette (Victoire Thivisol) lying in a hospital bed. She is a small, four-year-old blond girl with a rather round and serious face. She has a cast on her arm and her father (Xavier Beauvois) is at her side. Ponette has been in a car accident and, we learn, her mother was badly injured and may not survive. Her father tries to cheer her by drawing a picture of a dog on her cast, but Ponette's priority is extending her little thumb far enough out of the cast to be able to suck on it. We next see this pair riding along a country road. Ponette wants to stick her head out the window, but he insists that she sit down. Ponette's father assures her that he, at least, can be depended upon to drive safely. He can barely contain his pent up anger at his now-deceased wife, muttering to Ponette about how stupid and irresponsible mommy was. Ponette rises to her mother's defense, saying, "She's not stupid!" "It wasn't her fault." Her father stops the car and, stepping outside, sets Ponette on the hood. He tells her abruptly, "Mommy's dead. She was all broken. They couldn't fix her." He then makes Ponette promise to "never die" and to "spit on it" (apparently a French form of a blood oath).

Ponette and her father are on the way to her aunt's home, where Ponette will be left for a while, probably so that her father can deal with his own grieving process. Ponette's aunt (Claire Nebout) has two children of her own, Delphine (Delphine Schiltz) and Matiaz (Matiaz Bureau Caton) (rendered as "Mathias" in the English subtitles). Matiaz appears to be the same age as Ponette while Delphine is perhaps a year or two older. Ponette gets precious little sensible help in dealing with her loss and her grief. Her aunt, who is devoutly Catholic, feeds Ponette her not-very-well-thought-out version of Christian dogma, intended as reassurance, but which only adds to Ponette's confusion. She talks to Ponette about the notion of Jesus's resurrection, setting in motion an expectation in Ponette's mind that her mother will return. Ponette dreams about her mother incessantly. "At night I live with my mommy, and during the day I live here. I like the night more," she says. Matiaz, who is often the most intelligent and always the most sensitive person in the film, points out that when his grandfather died, he didn't return. Ponette retorts that, "No one was waiting for him." When Ponette's father learns that Ponette is waiting for her mother, he berates her, saying, "Are you crazy? Yes, you are." Ponette seeks solitude and implores the absent spirit, "Now that everybody's gone, you can come, you can do it just for me."

Ponette is at a loss to understand why her mother is being buried in the ground. Here, even Matiaz is of little help, explaining that people stay underground if they are properly buried. Zombies rise up from their graves, he suggests, but Ponette's mother will stay in place because she's had a crucifix laid on her chest. The pillow, he insists, is to ensure that she will sleep forever. Then, he concludes his lesson by adding, "I like living above ground. I really hate skulls." Ponette is encouraged to leave a gift in her mother's coffin to make her happy, but wonders why she can't leave a really big gift so her mother will be happy enough to come back.

Receiving no help from the adults in her life, Ponette drinks in the well-meaning but absurd advice of her peers. She is advised to ask Ada (Léopoldine Serre), a Jewish classmate, since Ada knows about these things because she is one of the children of God. Ada determines that Ponette needs to undergo trials before her mother can return. This culminates in Ponette being left in a dumpster, which only deepens her sense of isolation and abandonment. It also doesn't help when the lid of the dumpster comes down on her little hand. An aggressive boy named Antoine, who plays with a toy gun, gets into an argument with Ponette, and tells her that her mother died because Ponette is mean. On another occasion, Ponette is advised to resurrect her mother with "magic smarties," a kind of candy that the kids pretend makes one kid fall in love with another.

Doillon occasionally provides a bit of comic relief from the droll principal subject matter. There's a scene in which several children are sharing a bedroom with a couple of bunk beds. One of the children has a single mother and the children earnestly discuss the meaning of the word "single." "They're people who are alone except for their kids, if they have kids," says one of the more knowledgeable. There's also some momentary relief for Ponette's despair, thanks to Matiaz, who showers her with kisses and rubs imaginary magic liniment on her chest. She tells him that she feels much better. Another time, when Ponette says she wants Matiaz to kill her so that she can be with her mom, Matiaz first points out that he doesn't know how to kill anyone and then adds, "I don't want you deciding to die. Give me a kiss." It's a bit pathetic that a four-year-old can recognize what Ponette needs but the adults in her life cannot.

In despair at the failure of all of the advice she's received, Ponette heads to the cemetery where her mother is buried. She scratches, for a bit, at the dirt as though to dig her mother up, then lies quietly. Suddenly, Ponette's mother (Marie Trintignant) appears to her – whether in a dream or miraculously is left to each viewer's imagination. We see immediately that the two of them have a superlative relationship – mother and daughter. We realize, for the first time, just how much Ponette has lost. They cuddle, laugh together, and talk quietly about meaningful things. No dogma, no stern admonitions, just loving conversation. Ponette wants to be with her mother forever, if not on this side then on the other. "No, life's not too much for my little girl," says her mother. "Now, you have to care about life." Ponette will have time enough to join her mother in death later on, but now is the time to be happy in her life. "Whenever you want," says her mother, "jump up and catch a memory of me." Her mother cannot stay because . . . well, because she's still quite dead! She leaves Ponette with her bright red sweater, and sends her off to greet her father. Ponette tells papa about spending the afternoon with maman and announces, "She told me to learn to be happy."

Themes: The first thing that stands out thematically, in this film, is how little help Ponette gets in dealing with her mother's death. The adults in her life were utterly inept and the other children have little to draw on in the way of counseling resources. Ponette's father appears only briefly in the film but it is painfully obvious that he has precious little in the way of parenting skills. Emotionally, he is little more than a child himself. He must have been utterly dependent on his wife, emotionally. The first indication of his emotional immaturity is his anger toward his wife. Accidents do not always indicate carelessness. That's why we call them "accidents." There is no indication in the film as to why the accident occurred, but even if there was negligence on the part of the mother, the father should understand that she's already paid the ultimate price and that he should help Ponette cherish the recollection of her mother and not disparage the mother in front of the child. He continues to compound that mistake with many others. He makes Ponette swear that she will never die. That could come back to torment Ponette with guilt later in her life and also implies that the mother could have similarly willed to live if she had cared enough to do so. Next, he abandons Ponette to relatives. Ponette has just lost the most important person in her life and now the second most important one walks out on her. Certainly the father has his own grief to deal with but what better way to deal with it than to devote himself to helping his daughter, who is, after all, the product of the love he shared with his wife. Instead, he leaves her to cope without any parental guidance. Additionally, he leaves her with a sister whose views in relation to childrearing and teaching children about life and death contradict his own.

Grieving is emotional work, not intellectual work. What Ponette needed was lots of attention, hugs, kisses, and joyful interactions that would assure her that life was going to continue to be a positive experience even after the loss of her mother. Young children do not actually love their mothers or fathers as people so much as they love the role that the person plays. The child loves being cared for, played with, and nourished. When a loving adult adopts a child in early childhood, they often bond very nicely, through their respective roles as parent and child. Late in the film, we discover that Ponette's mother was a superlative mother, giving Ponette everything that a mother should: tenderness, physical contact, reassurance, playful interaction, and so forth. None of the adults who remained in Ponette's life stepped in to replace those gifts. The aunt offers Ponette a bunch of pathetic dogma, but never once hugs her or cuddles with her or even spends quality time playing with her. Her father scolds her, abandons her in her time of need, and places demands on her that have to do with his own needs rather than hers. In the absence of emotional nourishment, Ponette is stuck having to deal with complex notions of death, afterlife, resurrection, and the like intellectually, which a four-year-old child and her peers are ill equipped to do. The result is a kind of freak show, like watching cripples trying to run a relay race.

One critic declares that the children in Ponette act like adults. That may be true, but mainly only because the adults in Ponette act like children. The aunt's "intellectual" understanding of life is no better than that of a child and the father's emotional development is badly stunted as well. Consider what the aunt offers to Ponette in the way of explanation of her mother's death: "She cried on her way to heaven. God cried as he waited for her. When God was Jesus on earth, he also cried." Not very reassuring for a child who really just needs to be hugged and cuddled. She adds, "But usually he's as joyful as a child." Ponette points out that she's a child and not feeling joyful at all. The aunt persists, "When we need God, he makes a sign. He touches you and you feel better." Ponette indicates that she hasn't felt any such sign. The aunt says, "You weren't paying attention," once again transferring the blame to Ponette. Ponette asks what God's touch feels like, so that she won't make the same mistake again. "Like nothing," says the aunt, "He's a spirit." What is a four-year-old supposed to do with such nonsensical advice? "It's not nice to lie to me," she says.

Ponette contrasts three different approaches to childrearing, two ineffective ones and one effective. The first adverse approach is that of the aunt, who throws irrational dogma at the child. It's highly likely that the aunt had the same nonsense thrown at her when she was a child. As a result, her thinking is confused and childlike in its magical quality. The father illustrates the second adverse approach. He is a rational thinker but an emotional cripple. He doesn't lay a lot of nonsense on his daughter but he's oblivious to her emotional needs. He calls her "crazy." After scolding her recklessly, he says, "I'll stop yelling if you stop acting crazy, okay?" I child shouldn't have to act like an adult in order to get her parent to act like an adult. The parent is supposed to be the role model. As an atheist myself, I would take offense at Doillon's representation of atheists were it not for the fact that his representation of religious people is, in its own way, equally insulting to intelligent people with religious inclinations. Atheists reject theism, which doesn't mean that they also reject all human sentiment or caring for one another.

At the end of the film, we briefly observe a very skillful parent – the mother. She gives Ponette warmth, physical contact and love, but she also succeeds in helping Ponette deal with the issue of death intellectually, taking into account Ponette's level of intellectual capacity. Feeding dogma to a child is immoral. It amounts to taking advantage of the child's limited intellectual capacity, in order to indoctrinate him or her into one's own belief system. It is an abuse of that person's right to self-determination. That does not mean, however, that children need to be denied every kind of non-rational mental sustenance. Consider what the mother offered. "Whenever you want, jump up and catch a memory of me!" What a beautiful idea. Obviously, it is not a strictly rational notion. Why isn't that idea as potentially debilitating as religious dogma for a child? Myths and metaphors do not have the same negative impact on psychological development that religious dogma has because they present themselves in the honest light of poetry. Myths and metaphors are ideas that we embrace while fully understanding that they belong to the world of imagination and sentiment. They are pleasant pretenses and happy thoughts that we use to sustain ourselves emotionally. Like "believing" in Santa Claus. Dogma, by contrast, is dangerous precisely because there are massive institutions devoted to convincing us that their silly assertions are actually true.

Childhood is a steady progression of stages of development. There is an age range during which each of our major skills emerges and is practiced. Deep existential questions about life and death and the relationship of the individual to the universe are not appropriate issues for a four-year-old to have to tackle. What Ponette needed, instead, was affection, happy times, and physical contact to promote healthy development of the emotional centers of her brain. Her intellectual development at age four should be focusing on basic skills, like reading and calculating and observing. What Ponette most has going for her, as a child, is that she had four critically important years guided by an excellent mother. Now, she's in for some difficult years ahead with an inept father and his relatives. In order to deal with grieving, she had to reach back into her memory of her mother to find help because no one left in her life could provide it. Even after death, Ponette's mother has more to offer her than any of her living companions . Ponette's mother gave her a good start that is evident in her strength of mind and determination. Ponette's decision to "learn to be happy" derived from a commitment to honor the memory of her mother and what her mother had given to her in those years.

Production Values: The great strength of this movie is the insight that it provides into how young children think, interact, and cope with a confusing existence. No other film provides comparable revelations about the workings of a child's mind at so early an age. Doillon interviewed hundreds of children, letting their own language and ideas illuminate the script. He chose his cast and then filmed them for hours in various situations, natural and contrived, and let their own spontaneous dialog dictate the script to some extent. The result is a movie that is a marvel of realism and simplicity. Ponette is really a kind of collaboration between its director and the children that is unlike anything made previously or since. On the emotional level, Ponette is a smashing success.

Thematically, however, the message inherent in Ponette appears to be totally lost on most viewers and reviewers, judging from the dozen or so reviews I've read. Doillon's films are said to be inaccessible and this one is no exception. Many reviewers complain about the film's ending – the mother's sudden appearance in the graveyard. Without her appearance, there would be no contrast between the ineptness of the "help" provided to Ponette by the rest of the people in her life and the splendid start on life that she received from her mother. The scene is crucial thematically to the film, not a "wrong step," "contrived," a moment that "destroys the emotional intensity and honesty," or "a miraculous solution," as four different reviewers claim. Ponette's mother "comes back" and "lives on" only in the sense that she will forever be a part of Ponette's memories and emotional core (which forms in the first years of life). One reviewer argues "Ponette is already light-years ahead of other children spiritually" because she has learned, through the prodding of her Aunt and Ada, "to connect with God." No, Ponette is ahead of other children emotionally because of having had a marvelous mother. By the end of the film, it looks like she will be able to hold onto that bit of advantage as she proceeds, motherless, because she has learned to connect with the memory of her mother's love. The red sweater given to Ponette by her mother represents warmth and a cheery disposition.

The cinematographer for the film was Caroline Champetier, an experienced photographer who worked also with Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Virginie Ledoyen. Her camera technique is highly active in this film, constantly delving into the principal character's expressions and gestures, hovering around her like an analyst.

Thivsol's performance won her a Best Actress award from the Venice Film Festival! Keep in mind that she was only four when the film was made. A lot of debate ensued about whether what Thivsol delivered constitutes "acting" or whether it is more a case of Doillon finding a way to let her just be and to record that on film. However it came about, there is no question that Thivsol's Ponette is a riveting and emotionally powerful character. When her eyes fill with tears or her lip begins to quiver, so do ours. Doillon chose Thivsol from innumerable school children because of her spontaneity in front of the camera. Other directors have used non-professionals, letting them just be themselves to an extent. One could argue that it is either the purest form of acting or not acting at all.

Bottom-Line: Ponette is an important film, despite being flawed in several respects, because what it does well, it does better than any other film. There are other films that have delved deeply into the interior life of children (notably Forbidden Games and Cria!), but, even then, it is in the context of an adult world. In Ponette, the adults are reduced to minor, subsidiary roles. I still think both of those other films better, overall, than Ponette, but Ponette is the most realistic portrayal of the mental life of young children ever filmed. Ponette is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 92 minutes. If you love kids, see this film!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older