Ponette

(Fox Lorber)

"It isn't joyful being a child," says the four-year-old title character after losing her mother in an automobile accident. The line underscores what's right and wrong about Jacques Doillon's lyrical glimpse of the initiation of innocence into mortality: it tries to remain true to a child's point of view while clinging to its detached adult notions of what that point of view might be. Victoire Thivisol, an ethereal child with limpid, expressive eyes, is Ponette.