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| Director Léa Pool |
SET ME FREE (Emporte-moi) A Canada France Switzerland (95 mi) 1999 d: Léa Pool
I think my movies deal with what’s difficult, missing, unsettled. There’s no point in making films about uncomplicated matters. The feminine presence in my films is always personified by the mother. A father may be there, but he always plays a relatively secondary role. Basically, he doesn’t add anything special on a creative level. My mother’s very absence has become the almost inexhaustible theme of my work. —Léa Pool
Léa Pool is one of the more distinctive Canadian filmmakers, marked by her own experience as a Swiss immigrant, making introspective films that focus on intimate emotions, exploring themes of love and exile, where her female characters are stripped of stereotypes. Born to a Swiss Catholic mother and a Polish Jewish father who fled the Nazi’s in Poland and settled in Switzerland during the war, emigrating to Canada at the age of 25 where she studied communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal, switching to filmmaking after taking an editing class, experimenting with various media, including short films, documentaries, and television. Influenced by European filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Robert Bresson, as well as writer-turned-director Marguerite Duras, Pool’s films are characterized by slow and fragmented narratives, intensely personal expressions of emotional turmoil, where this film specifically suggests cinema is a mixed media montage, using movie clips, musical selections, close-ups, and lyrical passages that include lesbian eroticism in a young woman’s coming-of-age search for expression and identity. Written by three women, Pool, Nancy Huston, and Monique H. Messier, though Pool was sued by writer/director Isabelle Raynaud for plagiarism due to similarities in the material, and was ordered to pay $40,000 to Ms. Raynault, while also adding her name to the credits, though it largely reflects Pool’s own family experience, particularly the difficulty many experience in embracing new national identities. Nevertheless, this deftly reflects a woman’s vision, as the director, producer, screenwriters, and cinematographer are all women. Set in Montréal in 1963, Hanna (Karine Vanasse) is a 13-year-old tomboyish girl just entering puberty, where the turbulent nature of her parent’s unmarried relationship can be emotionally abusive, keeping her at a distance, with an older brother Paul (Alexandre Mérineau), with whom she has a close yet ambiguous relationship, yet she is especially close with her Catholic mother (Pascale Bussières), who is delicate and fragile, while her perennially unemployed father (Predrag “Miki” Manojlović) is a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi’s and spends his time working on unpublished poetry, where it’s noticeable that there are no relatives on his side of the family, a void left from the Holocaust. Hannah refuses to be categorized as Christian or Catholic, claiming Judaism is passed through the mother, while for Catholics it’s the father, but she still faces vile anti-Semitism at her school. Her father lost his nationality during the war and has never embraced either the Québécois or Canadian identity since then. This sense of rootlessness is at the heart of the film, living in an economically deprived part of the city, where they struggle to pay their bills, with her mother working long hours at a sweatshop sewing factory, then typing endless revisions of her husband’s dictated poetry in the evenings, which is how he defines himself, leaving her depressive and suicidal, exhausted by the physical and emotional toll of their tortuous love/hate relationship, further exasperated by his angry, over-controlling nature, unable to see his own callousness, as he slaps her around, taking out his frustrations on her, which tears the family apart. “There are very few films about the second generation of the Holocaust—who are the children of the survivors,” Pool says. “You carry his pain as a child, his suffering, and his madness too.” There are depths to this film not often found in coming-of-age stories, infused with moments of unsparing cruelty that recall Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), yet told with an impressionistic flair and artistic grace.
But the beauty of the film lies in the brilliance of her escape into movies, as she obsessively watches Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), drawn by the allure of feminine mystique in the ill-fated heroine, Anna Karina, who she tries to emulate, as she holds a cigarette like her, enamored by the liberated way she speaks and dances, exuding confidence and an air of sophisticated nonchalance that girls her age simply don’t have. Beautifully edited by Michel Arcand, who edited seven films by Pool, mixing various styles together, including clips of Godard’s film that are like a love letter to cinema (exactly as Godard intended) skillfully interwoven into the narrative, accentuating a musical sequence where Hanna shimmies just like Karina, Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:28), with Godard’s film actually infusing a refreshing New Wave energy into the film, while also instilling gravity into her character, where it’s essential she follow Karina’s example and learn to become responsible for living her own life. The Swiss-Canadian filmmaker gives thanks in the end credits for the use of the clips to Godard, her favorite filmmaker who made his home in Switzerland, which is a small country, sharing the same sound editor, François Musy, writing a hand-written request, to which he responded, a note she still keeps, “Dear Léa, Do what you want. — Godard.” It’s a remarkable offering that he didn’t allow others, having an unmistakable impact on this film. Hanna projects her obsession for Karina onto her teacher (Nancy Huston, one of the screenwriters), who bears a strange resemblance, developing into a fantasized crush, while also taking romantic interest in another girl, Laura (Charlotte Christeler), Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:58), with both of them helping her navigate her way through the tricky aspects of adolescence. The skyline of the city of Montréal is a backdrop to the film, viewed as a place of transition, authentically capturing some of the complexity and difficulties of becoming an adult in the 1960’s. Yet it begins in the rural countryside of Québec where Hanna is spending her summer vacation with her overly strict grandparents, spending the sunny days swimming in the lake, yet when her father phones at dinner time, her grandparents immediately grow testy, claiming that meeting him was the worst thing in the world for her mother, accusing him of being a no-good, out-of-work communist, but what they really hate is that he’s Jewish. Such things were said in the early 60’s, but it’s a reflection of the dysfunctional family dynamic, mirrored by recurring scenes of Hanna sinking underwater, seemingly weightless, images that appear like a leitmotif throughout the film. Something must be said for the innovative musical selections, featuring plenty of rock ‘n’ roll, like Inez and Charlie Foxx - "Mockingbird" (1963) - YouTube (2:35), Ben E. King - Stand By Me - YouTube (2:57), Dion - Runaround Sue (HD) YouTube (2:51), while also incorporating the atmospheric, mood-inspiring cello music of David Darling and the avant garde jazz sax of Jan Garbarek, though the original music was written by Robyn Schulkowsky. One thing this film features, which you never see today, is kids sitting around and just “listening” to music.
Coming on the heels of Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) (1998), a coming-of-age same-sex romance that captures all the cruel complications of being a teenager, much of it growing out of the insecurity of the age, Hanna is at times tender yet also openly rebellious in this quietly devastating film, possessing a powerful emotional resonance, set in a precise historical context, the Quiet Revolution, a period of unbridled economic and social development in Québec. Beautifully shot by Jeanne Lapoirie on 35mm, this is a simple but lyrically conveyed story, deploying surreal montages and underwater dreamlike sequences to reflect Hanna’s mental confusion and sensory overload. By concentrating on same-sex relationships throughout her career, Pool, who is openly lesbian, establishes a personal connection, where themes in her own life appear in her work, demonstrating an effort to transcend conventional categories of identity, creating a universality more reminiscent of European arthouse cinema. Yet in this film a love triangle is problematic, as not only is Hanna attracted to Laura, but so is her brother, who quickly starts dating her, creating both same-sex and incestuous desires, perfectly expressed in a kissing game, and a night together in the same bed, yet these conflicting feelings are not anchored in any specific identity, remaining elusively outside the realm of convention. Same-sex attraction can also be understood as a compensation for insufficient or altogether absent motherly love, as Hanna is continually searching for a source of affection, a common theme throughout Pool’s films, “I believe that femininity is built on identification with one’s fellow man. The mother first. When she is not there, the little girls find substitute figures. That’s what my film is about.” Her parents are ghostly figures, as they retreat and disappear as often as they make their presence, with her mother suffering emotional difficulties, prone to overdosing, where she’s taken to a Catholic sanitarium at one point after a failed suicide attempt, remaining nonresponsive to her daughter’s pleas to talk, while her father’s combustible anger sends her fleeing in disgust, sleeping on the streets, emulating Karina’s work as a prostitute, which ends badly, only to turn up on her teacher’s door one morning, where she urges Hanna to find her own voice, lending her a Super 8 camera to use over the summer, where the impressionistic imagery serves as the genesis that would later emerge in the director’s own career. Throughout the film, Hanna has been trying to get close to her mother, to have her be a presence in her life, with no success, but with a camera she’s finally able to bring her into her life. An exploration of identity and exile, as well as her Jewish heritage and sexuality, the film is dedicated to Pool’s own mother and to her daughter, ending with Hanna accompanying herself on the guitar with a song Brigitte Bardot sings in Louis Malle’s A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR (VIE PRIVÉE) (1962), Brigitte Bardot singing Sidonie 1962 YouTube (1:02), which plays out over the end credits. Interestingly, the film was released in the United States on a single screen in New York, receiving a wider release at film festivals in fifteen countries, where it was awarded Best Screenplay at the Chicago Film Festival, while also winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin. Made during a time when there weren’t many female directors, Pool acknowledges, “I think what makes it difficult is that we have now 100 years of the history of cinema that was completely done my men. When we arrive with our scripts and our imaginations, they think we are weird. They don’t think it’s a script. It doesn’t look like a script or it’s too different or there isn’t enough action and they don’t know what to do.”
