Willem de Kooning, one of the leading lights of the loose crowd who were bunched together as Abstract Expressionists, confounded the critics by making paintings that were recognisably women, although his way of working made Jackson Pollock look like a model of delicate reticence in contrast. Was it abstract or figurative? The correct answer is: Who cares? 'Innocence' also treads its own path without acknowledging categories. It's about a girls' boarding school, but more Angela Carter than Frank Richards. It's an excellent idea to get all the credits out of the way before the story begins, so that the final scene has all the power a final scene aught to have; the last chord, the last word. It opens with perhaps a universal wet dream sequence, followed by what appears to be a close-up of the Great Sperm Race. A sharp cut to the crisp roar of a little waterfall, then to the arrival of Iris (Auclair) surrounded by the girls of the school. It's never made clear what kind of school this is; it could almost be a metaphorical afterlife. The grownups look like it's any time between 1960 and now, but this is ambiguous, and it feels like the eighteenth century much of the time. And although the film is disingenuously literal throughout, plenty of the 'literal' happenings turn out to be heavily allegorical. The long, slow, takes add to the impression that everything may have a hidden meaning; and the mystery surrounding this institution, the girls' provenance and fate plus the insistent signs of wholesome purity, from the white uniforms to the furry animals, lead to a sense of quiet foreboding. A few incidents are baldly described as matter-of-fact but then take on symbolist colours, and also some apparently deep and resonant actions appear in the end to be more quotidian than Bunuelesque. But these girls are going through sexual awakening in an enclosed place and time, and the compression makes for a meditation on this, its universality and the 'school's analogous relationship to bone marrow, the source of our lifeblood. A typical mix of elements might include the oldest girl, her tousle-haired fate and an unashamedly erectile fountain. So it goes. Es la vida.
Review of Innocence
