Film Screening: Little Girl Blue

The clever docudrama about loss, memory and love, starring Marion Cotillard, was shown at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

A serious young woman wearing a blue jumper and glasses is sitting on the floor, surrounded by old photographs, recordings, and other documents. Her name is Mona Achache, the film’s director, and she is looking at the detailed documentation of the life of her mother, Carole Achache, who committed suicide in 2016. Later, Marion Cotillard enters the room as herself, and Mona gives the actress her mother’s clothes, wig, jewelry, glasses, and even perfume, so that she can impersonate Carole and help Mona understand, how and for what her mother lived.

Carole Achache was bound to become a documentary protagonist with or without her daughter’s personal interest. A writer, actress, and photographer born to an influential French family, who saw Jean Genet, William Faulkner, and Marguerite Duras at her family home as a child, she lived a tragic life in a constant search for herself. Marion Cotillard slowly and meticulously assembles Carole’s image, memorizing excerpts from her diaries and repeating them time and again for the camera, offering herself to the director as a medium, and helping her reconstruct a picture of the mother she never really knew. This process reveals the flexibility and fragility of memory, which we recollect from uncertain glimpses of the past.

The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.