‘Little Girl Blue’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Mona Achache. France, Belgium. 2023. 95 mins.

In Little Girl Blue, writer/director Mona Achache (The Hedgehog, Valiant Hearts) reconstructs her mother’s life in order to better understand her death. An emotional personal journey is conveyed in this unconventional docu-drama graced by a committed central performance from Marion Cotillard. The cultural references and literary figures at the heart of the story (Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras and others) will hold a particular fascination in France, but the uncovering of history repeating down the generations of one troubled family provides a wider resonance. Cotillard’s presence should help draw audiences to an intense, intriguing story.

A shocking tale of abuse, shame, self-loathing and the quest for redemption

Early in Little Girl Blue, we glimpse the 2016 death certificate for a 63-year-old woman. It is recorded as a suspected suicide by hanging. Years later, Mona Achache is surrounded by all the chaos and clutter of her late mother’s life. Carole Achache left behind thousands of photos, countless journals and tapes, and appears to have been an obsessive chronicler of her own life. Browsing a computer file, Mona finds a series of questions: ’who will read what I’ve written in the depths of this folder? Why is there always this hope of being understood after my death?’ Her mother appears to be issuing a challenge from beyond the grave.

There is ample material here for a conventional documentary and Achache makes use of traditional elements to tell her story, including family photos, home movies and old interviews. She also attempts to make the film more of an investigation. Walls are festooned with collages of photos as if she is tracing the connections in a spider’s web of a criminal network. Then Marion Cotillard walks into the room. Strained-looking and impassive, Cotillard offers herself to Achache as a blank canvas.

Stripping to her underwear, Cotillard dresses herself in the clothes that Achache presents – her late mother’s jeans, t-shirt, scarf and glasses. She dons a wig, accepts Carole’s handbag and its contents and a skoosh of her preferred perfume. Suitably transformed, Cotillard plays Carole in reconstructions of key events and interviews. It is an approach echoing the lip-synching triumph of Alan Cumming in My Old School (2022). Achache goes even further by making the viewer aware of the process. We witness Cotillard running her lines, fluffing her dialogue, trying to match Carole’s words with her lips and receiving specific instruction from the director. It can break the spell of the performance but Cotillard does deliver, especially in the soul-searching, confessional scenes from Carole’s later years.

Achache widens her investigation to burrowing into the echo chamber of her family history. Carole, a writer and set photographer for Claude Sautet and Bertrand Tavernier, among others, published a 2011 book Fille De/Daughter Of trying to unravel her relationship with her mother, the writer Monique Lange. Gradually the layers are peeled away as we get to the truth of a family marked by abuse, a heavy burden of guilt and the inability to prevent the transmission of suffering from one generation to the next.

The evil that men do lies at the base of the story. Achache lays bare shocking revelations of Carole’s reported treatment at the hands of Jean Genet, and Monique Lange’s complicity in what happened. The cumulative effect of subsequent incidents and relationships in Carole’s life provide a greater insight into why she chose death by suicide. 

Achache’s voyage around her mother ultimately blossoms into a shocking tale of abuse, shame, self-loathing and the quest for redemption. It offers a brave, cathartic reckoning with the past and the people in your life that you can love and hate, often at the same time.