Bring the Pain

If you like watching people hurt inside, Set Me Free should do the trick.

It's not easy being a 13-year-old girl, especially when your mother has a mysterious, life-threatening illness and your father's a ne'er-do-well poet who can't hold down a job. Oh, and you're half Jewish, thus targeted by anti-Semites. And your uncle has Down's syndrome. And you just had your first period. And you may be gay.

Adolescence is tough to begin with, but the French-Canadian film Set Me Free, which was Canada's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and has since been picked up by Merchant-Ivory Productions, certainly stacks the deck. Set in 1963 Quebec (although, with only minor tweaks, it really could be set in any time period), writer-director Lea Pool's sixth feature film (her others remain largely unknown in the U.S.) tells the story of Hannah (Karine Vanasse), the durable adolescent who must weather all the aforementioned storms while maintaining a semblance of sanity. It's hard to begrudge her an identity crisis: Dad (Miki Manojlovic, currently appearing in Portrait Chinois) is a Polish Jew who narrowly escaped the Nazis in France, but Judaism is passed down through the mother, so Hannah doesn't consider herself Jewish. Mom (Pascale Bussieres) is a lapsed Catholic with anti-Semitic parents, but Catholicism is passed down through the father, and Mom hasn't converted to Judaism, so the Catholic identity won't do either. This being the early 60s, proud atheism hasn't been embraced, and the whole peace-and-love movement isn't yet evident in French Canada. Like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Hannah seems able to find peace only when she goes for a swim and quietly sinks to the bottom. The film hints that she's flirting with suicide, although she's more concerned that her father will off himself than she is with her own potential termination.

The only escape Hannah has, is, naturally, the movies. Specifically, Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie, whose strong heroine quickly becomes Hannah's role model, despite the character's belief that you must take responsibility for everything -- good advice, except, perhaps, when your out-of-control father is constantly waxing self-righteous and making you feel guilty enough to begin with. Mom's working all hours to support the family in a sewing warehouse, and lascivious men seem to lurk around every corner just looking for underage girls to grope. Fortunately, the all-girl Catholic school Hannah attends is nonstereotypical -- it actually boasts at least one understanding teacher (Nancy Huston) who doesn't cast judgment upon Hannah's unmarried parents, and smokes like Anna Karina in Vivre sa Vie.

In what may be an attempt to curb her burgeoning hormones, Dad makes Hannah cut her hair short and boyish, which she hates, but romance blooms anyway, sort of; a bizarre love triangle forms between Hannah, her brother (Alexandre Merineau), and her new friend Laura (Charlotte Christeler). Envision Angelina Jolie at a younger age, or better yet, don't. Let's just say it's like nothing you'll ever see in any American coming-of-age story.

Somehow, the nonstop traumas don't make you ill with emotion, and that may be because the soundtrack is mercifully sparse and unorchestral; the polar opposite of the likes of John Williams or Rachel Portman. And we don't see that many tears, either -- they're spared for the most confrontational scenes. Perhaps the key is that writer-director Pool sees everything through the eyes of the children, rather than as an adult who "feels their pain." Adults are so unimportant that they aren't even given names: The credits just list such characters as "the mother," "the father," "the teacher," and so on. The film also remains visually interesting throughout, as Pool gets a lot of mileage, for instance, from Hannah wearing a red raincoat against a background of blue buildings and blue-suited adults. Vanasse is a fine mess of adolescent confusions in the lead role, and Manojlovic strikes the right balance of impotence, terror, and pathos as the Jewish father struggling to maintain his heritage while failing at everything else.

It would be nice if the script hadn't thrown quite so many obstacles in Hannah's path -- did she have to be half Jewish, poor, molested, menstruating, lonely, and potentially bisexual all at once? -- but her ultimate salvation should wring a few knowing laughs from most audience members, even if we can't quite buy the intensity of the freshly navigated emotional minefield.