Little Girl Blue

Mona Achache's film is primarily a portrait of three generations of women immersed in an artistic milieu that should have encouraged their talents but instead crushed them. The first woman, Monique Lange (1926-1996), a novelist and screenwriter, was an intellectual figure in the 1960s and 1970s. As publisher at Gallimard, she is friends with Violette Leduc, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner and Roberto Rossellini, but especially with Jean Genet. Monique gives birth to a daughter, Carole, who grows up close (too close) to these prestigious intellectuals and will become a writer herself. In 2016, Carole takes her own life, leaving behind thousands of photographs, letters, recordings and home movies. The third woman, Carole's daughter Mona, seeks to understand the past and the reasons behind her mother’s act of despair. To get to the heart of the story and its shadows, Mona Achache uses cinema rather than literature. She calls on actress Marion Cotillard to play the role and life of Carole as truthfully as possible. At the intersection of psychoanalysis, documentary and fiction, the filmmaker shows us the mechanisms of toxic behaviour and the patriarchal model that turns women into both victims and accomplices. And it is precisely by exposing this that she can free herself from it and finally put a stop to it.

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