Louise Hémon’s folk horror debut feature The Girl in the Snow breathes new life into the genre of epoch dramas
During the screening of Louise Hémon’s alpine intriguing debut feature The Girl in the Snow (L’engloutie) which premiered in Director’s Fortnight during the 78th Cannes Film Festival, I felt as engulfed by the sunset-soaked and nightfall threatening darkness in this alpine epoch drama as the young men who are mysteriously swallowed by the mountain. To become utterly enchanted by a piece of cinema is a rare experience at a festival where you might watch up to five films a day. Regardless of whether the films have quality or not, being thrown between social realist, summerwarm Marseille youth portrayals, such as Prïncia Car’s brilliant debut The Girls We Want (Les filles désir) and kabuki-inspired mafia melodramas, like Sang-il Lee’s endlessly plot-twisting and yet somehow tedious Kokuhô, inevitably fragments one’s perception.
But snowy, sensual, and raw in emotion; sharp and synth-musically artistic in form, it was impossible to not become intrigued from the very start by Marine Atlan’s chilly cinematography as she captures the young Aimées (Galatéa Bellugi) torch flickering struggle through a pitch-black night in the film’s opening scene. A light in the darkness is maybe how Aimée perceives herself, not realising the pitfall she brings to the remote village where she will work as a teacher. Louise Hémon’s French schoolteacher drama feels like the result that might have emanated if Michael Haneke and Albert Serra had met at a ski resort and together written a script equally critiquing French peasantry and sexual desire.
The year is 1899. Aimée Lazare arrives in a desolate mountain village, no larger than a few huts, where she will tutor the children of a remote household, specifically teaching them to speak and write French instead of their Alpine dialect. She is a young and determined worker, and the strength of Hémon’s portrayal of this character, inspired by the real female tutors who did take on this task, lies in how Aimée is being depicted as both a participant in the French Republic’s repression of regional cultures and at the same time an empathetic idealist, believing even the poorest and most isolated people deserve equal access to education and society.
Aimée is complex and fractured: by day, an apron-wearing institutional beacon of reason; by night, a solitary girl who, in a sensual gesture, traces her finger across the illustration of a man in a book by René Descartes in lack of better options.
Soon enough, the two young men she sees upon her arrival, sunbathing on a boulder encircled by white snow, draw her attention. While Pépin – Samuel Kircher who is recognized from Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer (L’été dernier) and seemingly enjoying a breakout moment after a powerful lead performance in Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes (La danse des renards), also screened in Directors’ Fortnight) – is a bit too boyish to Aimée’s taste, her gaze turns toward the rifle-carrying hunter Enoch (Matthieu Lucci). When she discovers the intimacy the two young men share – the same that she also longs for – it does not diminish her desire but intensifies it. Beneath thick furs and smoke-stained dirt, they all share a need to be touched.
As the initial animosity between Aimée and the wary villagers softens – especially through the love she receives from the children who become her strenuous students – the film allows the claustrophobia of this isolated valley to slowly open up to a narrative that is, if not an explanation, at least an evocation of late 19th-century France, with its tensions between peripheries and metropoles. Young Daniel (Oscar Pons) has no parents; he says they departed for Algeria. Or is he just an orphan to whom the region on the map that Aimée brings with her, represents a mysterious, otherworldly place? The film evokes a feeling in which different outskirts – the North African colonies and the Alpine mountains – exist in relation to each other, bypassing the central authority that once bound them.
“I’m not so ignorant,” Pépin says to Aimée as they study the map. It is New Year’s Eve, and as the rest of the party, including Enoch, has succumbed to drink and sleep, the young man and woman find themselves alone in her room. A magnifying glass exploring the veins on Pépin’s arm as if they were rivers flowing from the map’s mountainous terrain is just one of many quietly exquisite moments that breathe personal life into this period piece.
But at dawn, as the first day of the new century begins, an avalanche strikes the area and Pépin is nowhere to be found. Coincidence or a warning from the mountain of what lies ahead? As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the greatest threat to the fragile human life nestled in this valley is to be consumed by the mountain – or by one’s own desire.
The film brings together the inner and outer bodily, emotional, and environmental landscapes without ever determining their interconnection, instead we linger in the softness of their haunting mystery. Just as the characters are caught between the weight of the backward 19th century and the encroaching rationalism of the 20th, we, the audience, are left to wonder whether the path forward is to unite the sensual and the rational or to separate them entirely.
Olga Ruin
©FIPRESCI