Lucile Hadzihalilovic is a first-time director who has until now been noted for her collaborations as editor and producer with that formidable modern shock-merchant Gaspar Noé. This, her debut feature, bears the dedication "à Gaspar". But it doesn't deliver a Noé-type kick to the stomach. What it has to offer is a vaguely - but only vaguely - sinister fairy-tale, bolstered with beautiful photography, very good performances from the children in the cast, and a meticulously created atmosphere of pastoral menace. All of it leading nowhere in particular.
We find ourselves in a girls' school in the middle of the woods; 10 or 12 little girls aged from about six or seven upwards are in residence, taught by two adults. They are not allowed visits from their family and they have no memory of how they came to be there - each new girl arrives in a coffin, the lid ceremonially opened with all the other girls present. They are not permitted to leave or to ask what lies outside the wood. Basically, we have about a dozen Little Red Riding Hoods here. So where's the wolf?
Hadzihalilovic draws upon the idiom of films like Zéro de Conduite and Mädchen in Uniform for this movie, though in fact sequences showing little girls purposefully marching towards the wood's perimeter-wall reminded me a little more of M Night Shyamalan's The Village. The movie comes to the brink, and perhaps beyond the brink, of sexualising and fetishising the little girls as they caper naked in woodland streams - which adds to the sense of transgression. That is: our transgression, a transgression into which we have been coerced by watching these children in the first place.
The director deadpans the question of innocence: these girls are as venially spiteful and manipulative as anyone else of their age. But if the school has a terrible secret, then the girls' innocence is presumably much more profoundly compromised by being complicit in that secret. As we follow the school's day-to-day life, terrible things happen which the children accept calmly, unjudgingly. One girl tries to escape, and is never referred to again. One murky moment shows a girl apparently subjected to intimate physical examination by an adult. The school could well be a kind of spiritual battery farm, or even abattoir. Given its extraordinary situation, it could hardly be anything else. But what and where precisely is the crux of this occult evil?
You will wait almost two hours for an answer to this. It is a leisurely wait, not devoid of dramatic interest, but ultimately opaque and frustrating. The girls themselves give outstanding performances, and in the first section of the film, when they appear to us alone, unmediated by any reassuring adult presence, it is gripping. But the appearance of the school mistresses, played by Marion Cotillard and Hélène de Fougerolles, effectively normalises the situation but without advancing the possibility of a satisfying explanation for it all.
In some ways, Innocence is like Jessica Hausner's eerie fantasy Hotel, which tries to reimagine the irrational setting of the fairytale within the real-world conventions of modern cinema. It is an arresting experiment, but here lacks the arrowhead of dramatic force. There are lots of lovely images and the girls themselves are really very good, but their insouciant power - in fact, their innocence - is not harnessed dramatically, or in any other way. I even had the uncomfortable suspicion that what I was watching was hardly more than a very classy pop video, lacking only a soundtrack by Dave Stewart. Hadzihalilovic is clearly a real film-maker with a fluent cinematic language at her disposal, but this film isn't saying very much.
