CThe sci line is seen through Saima’s beautiful fantasy recovery memory and dual secrets of the future: simple, elegant and very dynamic. I immediately fell under its spell, and I started thinking about classic English stories like Tommy’s Midnight Garden by Philip Pierce or The Child in Time by Ian McQueen. And there’s an added textual pleasure in wondering exactly what her baby stars thought about her during the film’s shooting – and now what they think about it.
Josephine Sanz plays Nellie, Marion’s eight-year-old daughter (Nina Muiris). The latter is under extreme stress. Marion’s mother recently died of long-term complications of hereditary bone disorder, which Marion herself had to avoid a painful surgical operation when she was Nellie’s age. Young Nellie arguably asks her mother if she can keep her grandmother’s cane, and Marian simply agrees. Then Marion and her partner (Stephanie Varupen) take Nellie on a difficult journey to her late mother’s home, where she grew up, and the memories come back – especially the secret hut she built in the woods next to the house. Marion is overwhelmed with grief and leaves Nelly alone with her dad. Nellie, being an only child like her mother, stands for solitude. His mother’s absence, physical or emotional, is something he had to deal with all his life.
Playing in the woods leads to what appears to be a half-finished hut in the clearing. A girl happily puts gloves on him, asking for help in making him. It’s a mirror image of Nellie (played by Gabrielle Sanz, apparently Josephine’s twin sister) and announces that her name is… Marion. After playing together, they return to Marion’s house, which appears to be a creepy mirror-image of her Nellie mother’s childhood home. And there’s Nellie Marion’s kind, withdrawn, bored mother, who walks painfully with a cane.
It’s a ghost story, or an illustration, played out with a realistic calm. Girls talk casually about the future and the past because they will talk about anything else. I’m holding my breath for a long stretch, as the young stars vaguely snuggle into a file with narrative rigor. They stay alone on the screen for a long time, just playing and talking.
“Secrets aren’t always the things we try to hide,” Nellie tells her new best friend. “There’s no one to tell them.” His secret has been given to us: the audience. Now Nellie’s mother was alone, like a child. Maybe Nellie always wanted her mother to be her friend, to talk to her directly and only to her friend’s own age. And maybe that’s exactly what adult Marion felt.
When I say that this meeting of two girls reminded me of Marty Ffly’s first encounter with his dad with his father back to the future, I was another brilliant film of a very different kind. There is a simple fact that your parents were the same age, had the same worries and fears and thoughts like you. And decisively, the same inability to see into the future – the future that you are. Making these two characters sensitive and delicate children is an artistic masterstroke on the part of Saima. What a wonderful movie – the jewel of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
