THE STORY – 1899. Hautes-Alpes. Soudain is a hamlet encircled by snow on the high plateaus of a remote mountain. Shortly after the arrival of a young primary school teacher, an avalanche claims its first local.
THE CAST – Galatéa Bellugi, Matthieu Lucci, Samuel Kircher, Oscar Pons & Sharif Andoura
THE TEAM – Louise Hémon (Director/Writer), Maxence Stamatiadis & Anaïs Tellenne (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
“It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” So begins Angela Carter’s 1979 retelling of Little Red Riding Hood “The Werewolf,” published in her groundbreaking collection The Bloody Chamber. The story is a twisting of traditional gender roles and expectations, notions of good and evil, somewhere between legend and pragmatics. The clash comes from knowing that even in the most basic fairy tales, life was never that simple and maybe the lessons we learned were the wrong ones.
Louise Hémon’s new film “L’Engloutie” (“The Girl in the Snow”) finds us not in the dank Victorian woods of Angela Carter, but instead in the high alpine country of the French Alps in a tiny isolated hamlet called Soudain. However, it is, similar to Carter’s setting, a cold country both literally and metaphorically.
The year is 1899 but you’d never know as this farming community continues as it has for centuries with its mix of folklore and prejudice, tradition and isolation. That is until the arrival of a young teacher, Aimée Lazare, played with a wide intensity by Galatea Bellugi. She takes in hand the instruction of the cute moppets who need to be taught French and schooled according to the ways of the modern state. There is resistance and suspicion from the elders, who speak their own dialect and believe that washing is unhealthy and brings disease.
On another level the slow burn sexual tension begins as the young men respond to her presence with uncertainty, unused to having a woman in their midst who they’re not related to. For her part Aimée is also aware of her own stirrings in the snow of the deep winter. So to speak. As an educator, she has the zeal of the trainee teacher, eager to impart freshly acquired knowledge, with the heavy hand of one unused to wielding authority. Her attitude to the community on a whole is patronising and her demand that she is spoken to in French has the whiff of the colonial occupier rather than the apostle of progress she clearly thinks that she is.
On one level the film is an anthropological study and Hémon’s background in documentary – she made the bodybuilding documentary “L’Homme Le Plus Fort” in 2014 – is discernible in her ability to pick out the telling detail, the interesting particularity and portray an enclosed world in all its strangeness. Also there’s an unavoidable feeling of a coming of age story, as Aimée has to win the respect of her young wards and shows herself resourceful in the spread of the knowledge she believes in.
But in some ways, this is all a sleight of hand as it soon becomes obvious that something else is going on in the snow. An older man dies and as the ground is too hard to bury him, his coffin is hoisted onto Aimée’s roof. “Why my roof?” she quite reasonably exclaims. But any sympathy we have for her as a beleaguered outsider begins to falter as young men go missing at night.
I won’t say anymore as the pleasure of the film (as in most films) is in discovery. What I will comment on is something I’m not certain about and this uncertainty is key to whether the film works or doesn’t work. And this is also something of a problem with many films – not necessarily in a negative sense. And that is (ironically) uncertainty. In other words, ambiguity. The film hinges on a possibility – and the film doesn’t quite play out its hand. Far be it from me to demand that films have to explicitly put their cards on the table – there has been a scolding article in The New Yorker recently about the over-literalism of films – but there are times that I wonder if the ambiguity is something in the DNA of a film or if instead the uncertainty is an indecisiveness on the part of the filmmaker and screenwriters Hémon, Anais Tellene and Maxence Stamatiadis. I’ll let the viewer decide and let the chips fall where they will.
On a technical level, the film is excellent. The cinematography by Marine Atlan makes the most of the beautiful mountain landscapes, channeling Caspar Freidrich David and catching the beauty of ice crystals blowing across snow as well as the dingy smoky interiors of the hovels where the villagers huddle against the cold. A folk dance is a particularly hallucinatory moment when the music by Emile Sornin mingles with the heat of the stove and the pagan like folk beliefs of the village to create a moment both ecstatic and dangerous. It’s half carbon monoxide poisoning and half Dionysian exaltation.
Previously seen in Margherita Vicario’s “Gloria!” (2024) and Anh Hung Tran’s “The Taste of Things” (2023), Galatea Bellugi is fantastic as the young teacher who might be capable of unsuspected darkness. Her fervor is that of an enraged little red riding hood, a pragmatic woman who could dispatch the wolf just as easily as be his victim.
As in Angela Carter’s story, the viewer’s notions of good and bad, and expectation of moral certainty undergo a shift. This is avalanche country. The precipes are loaded with a full winter’s worth of snow and the slightest tremor can bring all that beauty down on unsuspecting heads.
