La Faute à Fidel (Blame it on Fidel).
I read reviews that this was a really charming coming-of-age movie, but it was really sad and depressing and slow. It's about as cheery as Mouchette, which ends with
 Spoilers! |
the little-girl protagonist getting raped and offing herself. |
Blame it on Fidel is about this little French girl who comes from a wealthy but not necessarily happy family. While she's attending her aunt and uncle's wedding at her wealthy grandparents' vineyard, she becomes aware that her dad's sister is there with her daughter, Pilar. They're refugees from Franco's Spain, and their arrival in France is a sort of catalyst for her parents going completely politically flaky.
Most of the early movie is about the girl's (Anna's) privileged life...convent schools, huge house, vacations in the country, swim meets, and so on. But as her dad and mom become "inspired" to be social activists, her childhood as she knew it gradually disappears. The parents, giving not a single shit about how it'll affect their kids' happiness or stability, decide suddenly to become communists, run off to Chile, trade the big house for a cramped apartment filled with "revolutionaries", and so on. The mother, who had a cushy writing job with Marie-Claire, decides to randomly and fervently adopt feminist causes instead. The kids are just kind of lost in all of this. They never know who they'll meet coming home from school, because their parents ditched the nanny they grew up with in favor of various refugee women.
Soon, the poor kids are so confused they don't know what's right anymore. Their grandparents are strict, moneyed Catholics and represent the comfort the children are used to; the parents are fickle and sort of fashionably Communist and get pissed if the kids don't jump on all the arbitrary bandwagons they do. At one point, they actually drag the little girl to a protest march, not seeming to care when she gets tear-gassed and lost.
The girl gets in some good observations, asking them if they really understand the difference between "group solidarity" and "sheep-thinking". She appears scowling and thoughtful throughout the movie, like she's trying to assemble some sort of belief system from all the crap that's being thrown at her.
I'm not exactly sure what point the director was wanting to make, so I took from it that her parents' fickleness and unreliability, combined with what she absorbed and observed, made her a stronger and smarter kid.
By the end of the movie I really hated her parents, but she seemed to grow to accept them.
One of the sadder parts for me was the repetition of scenes where kids wanted to "Sunday" (sort of a French family thing where the entire family hangs out together, it's called "Sundaying") and the parents eventually just blew them off altogether with some sort of crap about bourgeois yadda yadda.
Depressing movie.
