Innocence (2004)

This French film was on my shortlist to see at the 2004 London Film Festival and I can't now remember why I didn't get tickets.  A beautifully-shot picture that probably would have looked better on the big screen, but I have finally caught up with it on DVD, where it still works well enough.  The writer-director, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, is the partner -- both artistic and personally I believe -- of the brutalist director, Gaspar Noe, but her work here in her first full-length feature could not be more different.  Based on a story by Frank Wedekind, it introduces us to the innocent world of young girls who reside in an isolated boarding school where they remain from about age six to just short of puberty with no contact with outside society and who "disappear" if they try to leave.  Each house holds seven girls who initially arrive by coffin and who are differentiated age-wise by the coloured ribbons in their hair.  Apart from a very loose training in ballet and biology, they seem to have no focus to their years there other than to be children and the non-professional cast do well as they frolic in their short white skirts, white leotards, or nude.  Any adult viewing this, however, can not help but think how this subject matter might be viewed by certain unsavoury members of our world -- since the children could well be seen as objects of desire, particularly when the oldest girls dance each night in a darkened theatre with no sight of their obviously male audience.  So yes there is a feeling of unease running through the idyllic setting and one is left with many unanswered questions, such as what becomes of the one girl selected each year by the Head and how do the others survive when released to society, without presumably friends, family or training.