Midway into Cannes a scene from one of the earliest films seen at the festival—Andrey Zyagintsev’s Nelyubov (Loveless)— refuses to leave my mind. Boris and Zhenya are quarrelling; deafeningly as always. That their marriage is on the verge of a breakdown is evident. The battle is now over their 12-year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov); not on who should get his custody but over the fact that neither of them actually wants to take responsibility for him. In the midst of the ugly fracas, the camera suddenly zooms in on the unloved, unwanted Alyosha, quietly hiding behind the door. He is fighting tears and unfathomable pain, broken in the face of the abandonment. The child’s loneliness is conveyed devastatingly.
In another shattering moment in Michael Haneke’s Happy End, a teenaged girl, Eve Laurant (Fantine Harduin), who has recently lost her uncaring mother, breaks down, little by little, on a ride back in the car with her long estranged father. All that the dad can tell her by way of consolation is that he is not used to having a daughter any more.
Then, in a poignant scene from Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, the deaf and mute Rose (Millicent Simmonds) makes silence evocative as she tells her aloof and detached mother, in sign language—“I Miss You Momma”.
Several of the Palme d’Or films this year have given centrality to children’s experiences and no wonder few of the most consummate and memorable performances and sequences in the last 10 days of intense viewing have come from them. It would be quite fitting indeed to see one of them—a stark Matvey, a fluid Fantine or a luminous Millicent, also deaf—grab an award this Sunday evening.
But it’s far from a happy, wholesome, sweet and cute representation of childhood. These are sad kids, lacking the comfort and security of adult figures, of the “normal” relationships and families in their lives. Eve talks about losing a brother when she was five and how she misses a sibling. She is suffocated and suicidal and when her father berates her after one such attempt at taking her life, her reply is simple and searing: “But you are so far off”.
Alyosha has no hobbies, he doesn’t go out and play, but sits at home at the table by the window to stare at the winter outside. It’s utterly cold outside and within him as well. Rose is like a child who has become semi-adult herself. Eve is highly observant, understands adults more than they can fathom themselves. She is able to see through her dad’s lies and how he is betraying his second wife and her step-mother: “Papa, drop the act, it’s no good.”
You see some children as a slice of the larger, dysfunctional family dynamics, as in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) but a lot of them come with a personality, character, identity and space of their own. You have Mija (Seo-Hyun Ahn) in Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, living in an idyllic South Korean village but curious about “retina display”, a girl who has attitude, empathy and perceptiveness in equal measure. She is someone who, unlike the adults around her, is able to see through the unethical corporates who are into livestock farming and engineered genetic mutations as well as the fascist, opportunistic animal rights activists.
They are all runaway kids in their own way. Alyosha has run away to hide himself from a world that doesn’t want him. Will that, ironically, help his parents seek him out and love him? The boy and his fate leave you feeling hollow inside.
In Moonstruck, the mission is different: Ben runs away after his mother’s death from his Minnesota home in 1977 in search of his long lost father. Years ago, in 1927, it was Rose who had run away from her New Jersey home to meet her silent movie idol Lillian Mayhew. While being carriers of their own family histories, theirs is a search for parental figures who, perhaps, no longer exist. For Mija, it’s simpler, and yet much tougher: to get her pet safely back home.
Happy End is about a metaphorical running away from life itself, into the world of mobiles and computer screens. Eve is an example of how social media and technology have become surrogate human bonding of sorts—the real relationships are being mediated by pictures, videos, emails and chats. From its ingenious start to the nifty end, with Eve and her mobile camera in focus, Haneke brings unhappiness a full circle and through the girl paints a despair-ridden human present and the future.
In some films, the portrayal of children gets tangential. Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer has children who are precocious for their age. It’s about the young adult as the repository of the sinister and eerie, in a modern urban horror allegory. The child from The Omen series in a new, and certainly not improved, version.
Kids also become the vantage point from which to offer a critique of society at large. There is a scene in Ruben Ostland’s The Square in which a pretentious discussion about a forthcoming art exhibition is happening among the employees of the gallery when the camera pans to the baby of one of the participants, lying blissfully in the cradle. The quizzical and amused look on the baby’s face is a most priceless expression, one that lifts the veil off the entitled world of arts and its presumed intellectualism. There’s yet another loud, aggressive and righteous fighter of a teenager in the same film, who is instrumental in awakening the conscience of the upper-class hero.
And then kids also become significant plot devices, determining a significant, all-important shift in the narrative. What would Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled be without two girls and some mushrooms? I won’t reveal any more.
