Film

Are children inherently political conservatives? That’s the question we pondered during this drama about a little girl whose upper-class life is disrupted when her parents become radicals. After all, kids like a clear chain of authority, they embrace the idea of private property (“Mine!”) and they hate change. Imagine how bad things are for nine-year-old Anna (Kervel-Bey). She loves stories about princesses, her family’s rambling country house outside Paris and the predictable routine at her Catholic girls’ school. But all that changes when her parents (Depardieu, Accorsi) get swept up in the political fervor of the early 1970s. They renounce their moneyed roots and move to a cramped apartment in the city, where bearded radicals show up to discuss effecting change.

Anna—who is either strong-willed or an absolute brat, depending on your tolerance for pouting, foot-stamping children—is outraged and confused by these developments. Gavras keeps her camera at Anna’s level so that we experience all this chaos as she does. At times this can be claustrophobic, especially since the solid Kervel-Bey is asked mostly to look frustrated for the first half. But as the movie nears the hour mark, Anna and the film’s sense of humor both loosen up a bit. It’s charming to hear Anna try to work out the difference between group solidarity, which her parents say is good, and mindless conformity, which is bad. A good question for a kid to ask, and not a bad one for adults, either.