LITTLE GIRL BLUE Discovery

Following the 2016 suicide of her mother – writer Carole Achache, filmmaker Mona Achache (THE HEDGEHOG) decided to tell her mother’s story, as well as the story of the complicated mother-daughter relationships across three generations in her family. The film opens as a straightforward documentary, with the filmmaker going through her mother’s voluminous boxes of papers and photos, an archive which also includes unsorted boxes of papers and photos belonging to her grandmother, editor and writer Monique Lange. Then actress Marion Cotillard arrives at the apartment, and following a brief exchange with Achache, undresses and puts on Carole’s clothes, a wig and colored contact lens. What follows is a remarkable hybrid documentary/psychodrama, a metanarrative telling of Carole Achache’s life story, portrayed by Cotillard and actively directed on camera by Achache’s daughter. Cotillard impresses with her actorly craft, including the occasional real-time adjustment as directed by Achache. The story of Carole Achache is harrowing and unforgettable: the daughter of a literary doyenne who counted many of mid-20th-century France’s leading intellectual lights among her clients and coterie – some of whom would go on to abuse young Carole – the teenage Achache became swept up in the revolutionary fervor of May 1968, and then spent a lost, hedonistic decade in Paris and New York marked by heavy drug use and occasional prostitution. With the 1980s came a husband, children, a steady job and success as a writer, but personal demons and haunting traumas never left her. –Todd Hitchcock