Mona Achache gives us a lesson in how to make a first feature as she contemplates her subject. It's nearly all set in one location, an elegant apartment building in a desirable street of Paris; it has a small but perfectly chosen cast; and it's based on a book by Muriel Barbery that sold 1.2 million copies in France alone. Perfect, as long as you can persuade the writer to trust you with her book.
That she did tells us something about the director's qualities and about French cinema, where there's a constant search for new talent. I only noticed these structural things later. The film drags us into its world quickly through the eyes and narration of Paloma Josse (Garance Le Guillermic), a precocious 11-year-old who doesn't want to make 12. Paloma can see herself sucked into what she calls the goldfish bowl of her family's narrow bourgeois existence, so she vows to commit suicide on her birthday.
Clearly, she is an advanced and dramatic little girl. We understand partly how she became so bright and sad when we meet her parents. Her father Paul (Wladimir Yordanoff) is a politician, distant and preoccupied. Her mother is a nervous beauty with "10 years' intimate knowledge of antidepressants and psychoanalysis". Solange (Anne Brochet) has a better relationship with her plants than with her younger daughter. She speaks to each plant as she waters on the balcony, unaware that the water drips on to the head of Madame Michel (Josiane Balasko), the building's concierge, in the street. That's a good example of how the story turns class consciousness into comedy.
Paloma films everything with an old Hi-8 video camera, secretly observing family and neighbours and voicing opinions that are much older than her years. No one notices, except when the camera is pointed at them. In her room, she draws, turning her walls into art, or making flipbooks that the director turns into animations. Paloma is smarter than everyone she meets except the concierge. She guesses that Mme Michel is hiding something in her tiny flat off the vestibule. A new tenant, Mr Ozu (Togo Igawa), notices it too, when she mutters a line in the lift. "All happy families are alike," she says. "But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," he responds, the opening lines of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Mme Michel's secret is that she reads. Her living room is a library, in fact, where she spends each night with the great works and her cat Leo, named for Tolstoy. She also knows about movies, which is why Mr Ozu's name interests her. She wonders if he's related to the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.
Achache directs this outwardly simple story with poise and intelligence. She adapted Barbery's novel herself and lives with the cameraman, Patrick Blossier, which must have helped with the making of a first feature. Her best decision was to cast Balasko, who's well-known in France as an actor, writer and director.
Balasko transforms herself in the role, twice. Mme Michel is grumpy and rude, a sagging, withdrawn person who keeps the world at arm's length, but she munches on chocolate when she reads, a sign that pleasure is not completely absent from her life. The contact with Paloma and Mr Ozu terrifies her but Balasko handles the changes superbly, each emotion scudding across her face like a series of small pains.
It's a surprising film, largely because of the way it successfully combines these odd elements: three misfits in the enclosed, strictly hierarchical world of an elegant old Parisian building. The writing never underestimates the audience by being too explicit, or making the characters too narrow; Paloma's mother is neurotic but also somewhat tragic. The movie is novelistic without sacrificing the immediacy that comes with film.
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