"Innocence": There's no escape from the planet of little girls!
If a semi-sympathetic portrayal of suicide bombers isn't enough button pushing for one week, try this one: a Gothic fantasy set in a mysterious walled complex, deep in the forest, where dozens of prepubescent girls are being raised for an unspecified future purpose in an unseen outside world. But despite a nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude adopted by certain critics, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's "Innocence" is a lovely, tender and, yes, innocent film about childhood, which captures both its light, idyllic moments and its undeniably dark undercurrents with extraordinary rigor.

This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful. French cinema can offer several exciting young female directors (including Anne Fontaine, Delphine Gleize and Siegrid Alnoy), but Hadzihalilovic jumps to the head of the line with her first feature. "Innocence" is a virtuoso performance, unsettling and beautiful and technically accomplished all at a stroke. If it distills and in fact thrives upon our intense discomfort with children and sexuality, especially when it comes to little girls, it does so (to my thinking) without a hint of exploitative intent.

Just to be clear, nothing we see or hear in this film would justify more than, say, a PG-13 rating. But in showing us, say, a group of young girls swimming in a river in their underwear, Hadzihalilovic is indeed throwing down a sort of challenge: These are children, and whatever ambivalence or anxiety we feel watching them lies in us, not in them, and in fact results from the difference between our world and theirs. While the alternate universe of "Innocence" is specific in detail, the movie is also an allegorical view of the distant realm before puberty, an isolated world which, once left, can never be recaptured.

Little girls come to "the park" in coffins decorated with seven-point stars, carried through underground passages by bearers we never see clearly. They arrive when they're about 6 years old, apparently plucked from ordinary family life and deposited here, where they are adopted by one of several small platoons, each headed by a 12-year-old who wears a violet ribbon in her hair. (The various colors of ribbon denote a specific hierarchy, both of age and authority.) They live in rambling dormitories, are fed and served by nearly silent older women, and spend most of their time studying biology or ballet.

But as Iris (Zoé Auclair), a wide-eyed Asian girl who is the newest arrival, quickly comes to understand, life in the park has some more troubling elements. Escape is strictly forbidden, and indeed seems to be impossible. Rebellion and rule breaking are dealt with harshly (even if we never learn exactly what that means). Furthermore, the older girls -- violet ribbons like Bianca (Bérangère Haubruge) -- go somewhere together at nine o'clock every night, and aren't allowed to talk about it. Whatever it is they're doing, they seem to be preparing to leave. Eventually the violet-beribboned girls disappear, everyone else moves up a color, and a new 6-year-old arrives in another coffin to take the newcomer's red ribbon from Iris.

Overseeing all this are the severely attired but fair-minded Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard) and Mademoiselle Edith (Hélène de Fougerolles), perfectly cast as a small girl's faintly sexualized fantasy projection of female authority. (Translation: They're really hot.) Telling you much more wouldn't be fair; by this point you're either dying to see this or determined to stay away. I'll add only that Hadzihalilovic pulls off the remarkable feat of keeping both the fantasy and allegorical plot streams valid and vibrant. When Bianca and her fellow violets surrender their ribbons and take a late-night train voyage to discover what lies outside the park, what happens next is both wonderful and terrifying. And as we now know, there's no train going back.

"Innocence" is now playing at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities to follow.

"The Passenger": The dude! The shades! The chick! The scenery!
Taken as a whole, Michelangelo Antonioni's films outline a rather bleak, quasi-existentialist theory of everything: We're all just atoms, hopelessly disconnected from one another or any sense of purpose, bumping around in the void. I can't say I care for this sophomoric version of modern philosophy, but Antonioni's films at their peak had a distinctive stylishness that almost, sort of, made up for their lack of content or emotional depth.

In the case of "L'Avventura" (1960) or "Red Desert" (1964) stylishness really is all there is, and those movies left an impact, first and foremost, on the world of fashion photography. "The Passenger" (1975) Antonioni's masterpiece, is something else again. (It's been unavailable for some years, and Sony Classics is now re-releasing it, undoubtedly to prepare the way for a DVD version.) In casting Jack Nicholson as the jaded Anglo-American journalist who abandons his previous life during a trip to Africa and adopts a dangerous new identity, Antonioni was working with a more powerful and charismatic actor than he has before or since. The result is something like a glamorous thriller or a disaster film in slow motion, and Nicholson's self-destructive character belongs on a continuum with his other great dead-end guy roles of the '70s, from Jake in "Chinatown" to Billy "Bad Ass" in "The Last Detail" and the failed pianist Robert of "Five Easy Pieces."

Nicholson's Locke -- in his new identity as an arms dealer named Robertson -- careens from central Africa to Munich to Barcelona to the increasingly decrepit resort towns of the Costa del Sol. (Among other things, "The Passenger" offers an unlikely travelogue of the not-yet-prosperous Europe of 1975.) Pursued by his wife, his boss, and unidentifiable would-be assassins, he picks up a nameless woman (Maria Schneider of "Last Tango in Paris" fame) he keeps seeing in the fantastical Gaudí buildings of Barcelona.

It's still all just cosmic anomie, the gloss of a Hollywood film without any of the alleged sense of purpose. But I don't mind a bit. Nicholson is as simultaneously sleek, dirty and sexy as a snake, and the screenplay (by Antonioni, Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen) is full of amusing non sequitur wordplay. The wide-screen cinematography of Luciano Tovoli is magnificent, and of course there's that climactic shot, many minutes long, as Nicholson lies motionless on the bed, literally waiting to die, while the camera creeps out the window of a fleabag Spanish hotel. Nothingness has never looked so good.

"The Passenger" opens Oct. 28 in New York and Nov. 4 in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.

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