Lucile Hadžihalilović's Innocence (2004)

Innocence is based on Frank Wedekind's Mine-Haha, or the corporeal education of girls (1901). Many French films nibble bits out of normality, many bite chunks out of it, but Lucile Hadžihalilović just blows normality out the window. A reviewer of her first feature Innocence on senscritique.com asks if the film is a Rorschach test, and I find this an extremely perceptive observation: people's impressions of this movie could be highly revelatory of a person's personality, and as for me I found it disturbing, as if I'd walked into a private room by mistake, as if I were being voyeuristic. Here, in an intangibly sinister self-contained boarding school miles from anywhere, young girls are mainly taught dancing plus a little biology. They are dressed in white and divided into age groups by the colour of the ribbon in their hair.

Why does the new girl Iris, who now has no parents, appear in a coffin at the beginning? When a girl disappears, where does she go to? Is this school essentially for grooming dancers to perform in front of an audience just to keep the school alive on the proceeds? Why does the onset of puberty end things (echoes of Amélie Nothomb here)? Is this some kind of religious sect, as the funeral pyre for Laura – the girl who tried to escape but drowned in the attempt – might suggest? Is there intended to be a paedophilic undertone: back to the Rorschach test. If not, why are so many of the scenes of young girls dancing ballets? Is there perhaps a reference to L'Affaire des Ballets Roses of 1959?

The film – intentionally – is full of questions and very few answers. It contains nothing of the horror of the much later Evolution, which involves young boys rather than girls, but there's something weirdly, inexplicably abnormal going on here.