An email from the French Embassy’s Los Angeles Film and TV Office landed in my inbox this morning, with an invitation to a screening of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette… held on March 6. Further ignoring the fact that it was in Valencia, I really wish this invite had arrived, you know, in advance of the actual screening, since Doillon was there in person.

An arresting bereavement drama refracted through the eyes of a little girl, this film is an absolute heartbreaker, and features one of if not the most affecting child performance I’ve ever seen. Victoire Thivisol (look at that face!) plays 4-year-old Ponette, who must come to terms with grief following the death of her mother in a car accident. She gets little sympathy and support from her atheistic father, who just dumps her with her aunt while, wrapped up in his own denial and anger, he goes back to work. Ponette’s aunt and her young friends confuse her with a mixture of religion and fantasy, to the point she ends up believing that her mother will soon be coming back to visit her.

It’s been years since I’ve seen the movie, and though I don’t at all doubt its staying power, I do ponder whether this is a case of actual performance, or just deeply superb, marionette strings manipulation-as-direction. Thivisol won the Best Actress Award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival, but four years old is awfully young, and the movie, largely in the contrast drawn between Ponette and her father, has a lot of substance to say about so-called truths that crumble into uncertainties when adults are called upon to try to explain them to children. It’s for this reason that I would have loved to talk to Doillon.