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Rainy day film: Ponnette (1996). Perhaps one of the most gripping performances ever and it was accomplished by one of the youngest actresses to win a Volpi, 4-year-old Victoire Thivisol. Victoire got a puppy from the director (Jacques Doillon) for her efforts.  Ponette, the title character, is a 4-year-old girl attempting to process the infinite indefinites of her mother’s death. She enlists the help of a young friend to try to reach her mother through her understanding of God/faith/afterlife.

Now, I saw this when I was 16 and, 15 years later, it remains one of the best films I have ever seen. It’s emotional and very real but all from the perspective of a young child (which I think is a keen perspective to consider when exploring grief…I think that we regress to those raw places when dealing with our own).

However, I do caution you. It may be very hard to watch this young actress go through the emotional torment of loss. One wonders how the director and her minders got her to project such fear, sadness, emptiness, and base curiosity about the end. It definitely made me think about the kind of damage done by emotionally charged roles for young child actors.  This can tangentially be linked to the kinds of arguments made by anti-porn feminists relating to the performance as being not just an act but also a lived experience (see MacKinnon’s Only Words (1994), Stoltenberg’s What Makes Pornography Sexy? (1994), Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1991) for these arguments).  It even makes me think of Judith Butler and the performance of gender.

TO BE CLEAR, PONETTE IS NOT ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY AT ALL. But what I’m talking about it the idea of children acting in film, performance as experience (though a mime or simulation of real life, a moment of that person’s lived experience IS that experience of performance) and also the issue of consent (which I think is far too complicated to cover here). It is obviously different but I think there are layers of sameness that make it worth thinking about.  Especially, if we take into consideration Foucault’s work and Frederic Jameson’s notion of pastiche in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Now, I am certainly not comparing grown women who make a choice to perform gendered sexual acts and mimesis in the sex industry to the work of child actors BUT I think there are philosophical similarities when one thinks of how a performance is actually part of the real. While it is acting, it is still creating meaning in time for the actor (in particular), viewer, and culture. Anyway…wonderful film and I think it, if you notice, a lot of the writers I listed were writing about these issues in the years just before it’s making and release. I remember critiques and feminists talking about the ethics of this film at the time and well…I think these things should be on our minds again today. Also, Ponette is now on “instant” on Netflix so there you go.