Lucile Hadžihalilović's La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996)

This medium-length film (fifty minutes) is by Gasper Noé's partner Lucile Hadžihalilović and we can see a clear preoccupation with young children as in her later films. Taking place mainly in a small appartment in an HLM, where Mimi (Sandra Sammartino) has been forced to go while her mother recovers from her suicide attempt, the colours here are predominantly sickly bright green and bright yellow.

This is racist territory, where Mimi's unwelcoming, self-centred aunt Solange (Denise Aron-Schropfer) willingly signs a petition against a family of Maghrébins (north Africans), and where Solange's new boyfriend Jean-Pierre (Michel Trillot) seems to be staying. Jean-Pierre's nature is shown by his violent use of strong language to a kindly neighbour who saw Mimi thrown out of the flat while Solange cleaned, and who let Mimi join him and his friends in a musical session; by him secretly watching a porn film on TV while Solange is asleep; but most of all by his casual attitude to a programme on paedophilia.

And Jean-Pierre is a paedophile, touching, stroking and trying to kiss the ten-year-old Mimi when Solange is out at work. For trying to warn Solange that he's a pédé Mimi gets a slapped face. Mimi attempts to escape a situation of sexual abuse over which she has no control by taking some of her aunt's diazepam supply, only to have her stomach pumped like her mother and to be sent back to her aunt and her paedophile boyfriend. Powerful and claustrophobic.

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.

Lucile Hadžihalilović's Evolution (2015)

Very little is certain in Lucile Hadžihalilović's first feature film in ten years, although it's harrowing and mysterious, and certainly some of it bears a suggestion of the dreams of the main character Nicolas (Max Brebant). This film is set on a island (in reality Lanzarote) in a possibly post-apocalyptic era, possibly a dystopian female-dominated society, but there are only strange women in control of pre-adolescents here, no men at all. Nicolas's 'mother' gives him a regular nightly dose of an unknown substance for an unknown reason, and Nicolas escapes from his cell-llike room frequently to do such things as join the other 'inmates' in the burial of a huge lobster or watch a weird ritual of women writhing together naked on the rocks by the seashore.

Nicolas's 'mother' pays close attention to what he's drawing in his sketchbook, as do the nurses, because this seems to be set in a dilapidated hospital, and Nicolas's 'mother' disappear into the background and nurses occupy her space. There are injections to cure Nicolas of an unknown illness: could it be that rebellion is the illness, and the evolution the film's title refers to be the evolution of consciousness? Probably not as the boys in a tank of water witness the birth of a baby, and the viewer can't discover anything because most of the acting is poker-faced, most of the images dreamlike/and or disturbing because they are open to many interpretations. We see a Caesarian birth, operations on Nicolas's navel. Nicolas becomes more inquisitive and a nurse, Stella (Roxane Duran), swims with him and gives him a long underwater kiss. She then goes from the island with him in a rowing boat, leaves him and the film leaves us with the bright lights of a town on another island or mainland.