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"Adults are obsolete children" (Dr. Seuss). Pippi Longstocking, Our Mother's House and The Bad Seed are curiously amalgamated into the image of the Quebec cottage with bodies in the cellar, presided over by Jodie Foster as a burgeoning, small-town Emily Dickinson. The girl celebrates her thirteenth birthday with cake and a smoke, the local creep (Martin Sheen) barges in to welcome her and cop a feel before her steeliness (and threats of an unseen paterfamilias) push him away. The wintry community scarcely warms up to outsiders, to the gorgonish landlady (Alexis Smith) "if you weren't on the first sailing ship, you'll always be an immigrant." Smith enters Foster's nest to glare at her forthright otherness ("Crosswords... and Hebrew") and ends down in the basement. The heroine finds a fellow oddball in the teenage smart-ass (Scott Jacoby), who dons magician's cape and walking stick, notices her chipped tooth, and hobbles to the rescue when Sheen puts out his cig on her pet hamster's peeper. Survival and resistance are her goals, she recounts her tale of pubertal autonomy in matter-of-fact tones somewhere between Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems and Village of the Damned. Teatime with the Big Bad Wolf, the Huntsman meanwhile is an affably clueless flatfoot (Mort Shuman). The novelistic strangeness of the material is compounded by the reticent staginess of Nicolas Gessner's direction, accommodating budding sexuality, submerged incest, and almond-flavored cyanide with the tranquility of Nabokov at his desk with fountain pen and monocle. The crawlspace between childhood and adulthood colors the canvas, giving the central query ("Since when do they let kids do what they want?") simultaneous traces of dream, fable, and danger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |