"It isn't joyful being a child," says the four-year-old title character of Jacques Doillon's Ponette to a gushy adult. That's a shrewd comment on the romanticizing of this much abused time of life -- but not when coming from a little girl who's right in the middle of it. The line underscores what's right and wrong about 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.

The film begins like a variation on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, with Ponette (Victoire Thivisol, an ethereal child with limpid, expressive eyes) sporting a tiny cast in a hospital bed after an automobile accident. Her father informs her that her mother is not likely to survive her injuries. She does not, but rather than accept her mother's death, Ponette decides to "wait." The rest of the film consists of improvised, episodic interactions between Ponette and various clueless, cruel, or compassionate adults and children and their appeals to her to get her act together. Her bewildered faith is poignant, and at times the fundamental pathos of her plight shudders into stark focus -- usually when Doillon is not trying too hard to be moving.

This has been done before, of course, and better, in the likes of Spirit of the Beehive and Forbidden Games. Too often Ponette just seems an exercise in making the cute kid cry. At the Kendall Square.