| Innocence | 
| Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Actors: Zoe Auclair, Berangere Haubruge, Lea Bridarolli, Marion Cotillard, Helene De Fougerolles
Studio: Homevision
Category: DVD
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $13.54
You Save: $11.45 (46%)
Buy New/Used from $9.74
Avg. Customer Rating:   (7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 66241
Format: Color, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Language: French (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD
Running Time: 122 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 3045
UPC: 014381304527
EAN: 0014381304527
ASIN: B000V6FVMK
Release Date: November 13, 2007
Theatrical Release Date: 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Description
Gushing water. Subterranean rumbling. Sun-dappled green vistas behind huge stone walls. So begins Innocence, a fascinating fable about a mysterious school for girls, where one arrives by coffin to a self-enclosed, highly regimented universe of botany classes, ballet and playtime. The journey from girl to womanhood and the dangers and perils contained therein has rarely, if ever, been explored in a more creative manner than in this intoxicating feature by acclaimed film director Lucile Hadzihalilovic. With stunning cinematography by Benoit Debie (Irreversible, Calvaire), a world both compelling and ominous unfolds as six-year-old Iris watches time pass and girls disappearing one by one... Starring Marion Cotillard, the acclaimed actress who portrays Edith Piaf in the hit foreign film, La Vie en Rose.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Fine-Spun Macabre Cinematic Magic August 28, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Like the very best gothic fairy tales, the film submerges us in an innovative, surreal aesthetic that evokes coming of age. The startling imagery (watery expanses alternately placid and violent, blood-bright ribbons and whitest uniforms) and cryptic but highly suggestive narrative hover between beauty and menace, embroidering a delicate, deadly spiderweb ambience. The shimmering magic and terrors of childhood and pubescence, which coil just beneath consciousness, are given phantasmatic form in sequences that suggest the permeability of boundaries we'd prefer to think staunch. Safety and danger, innocence and perversion, bodily resilience and fragility, nature's loveliness and destructiveness all bleed into each other. Is the girls' school a nurturing haven or site of sinister machinations? Will the "outside" proffer the escape into liberty or unnameable new horrors? How can we understand "birth" and "death", is the coffin from which new arrivals spring also a sort of womb, are new life stages necessarily also a deathly adieu to what came before, a rite initiated in blood? For what are the best girls "chosen," and is that good or bad? The unforgettable sequence in which the preteen butterflies are ushered through an enormous grandfather clock to dance for an audience that we gradually discern comprises older male figures is appalling in the most subtle of ways, staging the dangers and vulnerable joys that beat, intertwined, at the heart of female pubescence. Reverberations of Angela Carter, Brothers Quay, Peter Weir, Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, yes, but there's an idiosyncratic, chilling yet oddly uplifting magic all its own here.
 Interesting for Marion Cotillard fans.... May 5, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
German expressionist writer Frank Wedekind's symbolist novella "Mini-Haha: The Corporal Education of Young Girls" (1888) is the basis for this film, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It takes place in a girls' school for affluent students, who arrive in a coffin, one by one, and who are not allowed to leave. (Anyone who tries to leave has to stay there forever, and become one of the old women who are servants to the current girls.) Marion Cotillard plays one of the two teachers, Eva, a ballet teacher; she is often moved to tears. The other teacher is a science teacher, who has a limp. The girls are always dressed in white. Is this beginning to sound like a dream sequence to you? The girls wear colored ribbons to denote their seniority; some of the older girls are eventually taken by train to a city, presumably (but never guess outcome in a dream) to attend another school. The film is admirably discussed on the DVD in two interviews with the director, who declines to "explain" what is happening here. Suffice it to say that this film does not respect chronology or explanation. Like other of Wedekind's works, it exists, and was created, to be absorbed rather than "understood," much as looking at a great painting is assisted by the viewer's openhearted acceptance of the effort. Not for everyone, but an interesting look at Cotillard's choices in her early career -- how the girls' freedom is always tinged with the oppressiveness of their days. Cotillard has a great line: "Obedience is the only path to happiness." Perhaps Wedekind was remarking on the way children were raised in his day. Perhaps the director is remembering her days growing up in an oppressive country in the l960s. It's all up to the viewer.
 Freak zone (SPOILERS LURK HERE!!! Do not read if you don't want to know!) March 17, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
"Innocence" is a freak show.
The setting is apparently some sort of school, although that is a term to be applied very loosely. It's a semi-penitentiary; all girls, each neophyte arrives in an elaborate (and locked) wooden coffin. There is a large starburst immediately over the (unconscious) child's face, covered in mesh wire, so the girl can respire.
Each novice is then introduced to the routine of her new prison-like existence by the established girls. Each "year" (reinforcing the school idea) wears an identifying color of hair ribbons. The classes the young ladies take are divided into biology/nature studies and dance. And dance.
And more dance.
It seemed to me this institution was a repressive ballet academy for young girls. Tyros are admitted at age six, such as Iris, the newbie whose story makes the central thread of this film. The departure age (I won't say "graduating" because there's hardly any kind of accuracy there) seems to be around fourteen.
Several elderly ladies minister to the daily needs of the charges but their roles are very minimal. The two instructors are Mlle. Eva (Marion Cotillard) and Mlle. Edith (Helene de Fougerolles), both younger women;
Eva seems to struggle with the harshness of the daily regime while Edith apparently bears no such compunction.
Iris asks repeatedly when she can return to her little brother. The answer: "IT IS FORBIDDEN". This is the reply to most questions, such as "When can I leave?" "Why can't we play in the woods?" and "Why can't I stop dancing"?
Another young girl--Laura--who was admitted at the same time as Iris, determinedly makes her escape. Despite the enormous, ivy-clad walls surrounding the "campus" of the dreary, run-down building, there is also a lake. Mysterious, forboding gurgling noises (like water in a rushing stream) mark the film's opening scenes. What the deeper symbolism of the creepy confluential cacophony is supposed to mean escapes me completely...
Brave little Laura lights out in a small boat, witnessed by Iris, who declines to accompany her. Laura makes it several hundred yards into the body of water when she (rather resignedly) notices the craft is leaking.
In the next scene, Mlle. Eva somberly informs her pupils (she is the dance teacher) that Laura will never be seen again and that they will hold a ritual in her honor.
And then they burn her--in another coffin, this one sans breathing-hole--
on an immense funeral pyre.
The viewer's foremost questions regarding this fable are 1) what kind of "school" is this? 2) where do the girls come from and where are their families? and 3) who is the "headmistress"?
Once a year, Headmistress comes to visit and has a special recital put on for her benefit. If she selects a girl, the student leaves the school with the Headmistress, never to be seen or heard from again. One poor student, believing she has a chance of being selected (and hence taken away), meets with crushing disappointment. Headmistress carefully examines each girl, even so far as asking to peer into her mouth (like someone choosing a thoroughbred!).
At some point, each class is promoted to "the theatre", where they perform their dance routines for live audiences shrouded in shadows.
Once each performing class meets some kind of criteria, they are shuttled out of the school via a bizarre underground subway and into Paris.
There they are enrolled in a "real world" dance school for high-school age enrollees.
"Innocence" is a movie I have seen billed as SUSPENSE. THRILLER. MYSTERY. Etc. I cannot say I find these descriptives useful. It is indeed freakish--there are just so many aspects of the tale left unexplained.
Still, it embodies the off-the-wall idiosyncratic flavor I enjoy in foreign films and it was certainly intriguing. Just don't sit down to this one expecting every oddity to be given a decent excuse...
 Video Quality is Terrible February 23, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I didn't make very far into this film - either the encoding is absolutely off or it was filmed with a cheap DV camera. There's some strange video (de-?)interlacing/combining going on that creates a horrible jerky blur around any movement. The reviewer who said it renders the movie unwatchable is right. What looked to be an interesting movie was completely ruined by shoddy image quality.
Growing up allegory January 25, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Innocence is probably the most challenging film I've seen but if you sit back you can figure out most things. A little girl arrives in a cioffin to a school in the middle of the woods. She lives in a house with other girls older than she is. The studies are simple:nature and ballet. Lots of play. But where do the older girls go? Why is no one allowed to leave? Who are the old ladies? A film about growing up with strings attached.
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