Film Review
Howard Buten's celebrated novel
When I
Was Five I Killed Myself drew little attention when it was first
published in the author's native America but later it became a massive
bestseller in France. One of the most insightful forays across
the disturbed mental landscape of a young child, Buten's novel does not
lend itself naturally to a cinematic adaptation but director
Jean-Claude Sussfeld made a reasonable stab at it with
Quand j'avais cinq ans je m'ai tué,
the last of four films he made before he gave up cinema and devoted
himself to working exclusively for French television.
Sussfeld's film is bound to come as a disappointment to anyone who has
read Buten's idiosyncratic novel but it is nonetheless an engaging film
that goes some way to expressing the confusion of an eight-year-old boy
who has yet to come to grips with the strange and mostly arbitrary
'rules' that adult society chooses to inflict on itself. It's
revealing that the settings for the boy's past and present are so
similar - the former a typical French infants' school, the latter a
psychiatric hospital for mentally disturbed children. As the
narrative flitters back and forth between the two settings they become
increasingly indistinguishable, two loveless institutions infused with
the same indelible stench of antiseptic and urine that educate by fear
and repression. Little Gil's wild flights of fancy, some banal,
others tending towards unbridled surrealism, are his only means of
escape from the unthinking cruelty inflicted on him by the adults he
cannot comprehend or communicate with.
There's some irony in the fact that the most terrifying adult Gil has
to deal with is a psychiatric specialist (Patrick Bouchitey) who
clearly has no understanding of child psychology and is only moderately
less scary than Hannibal Lecter. A more junior doctor (Hippolyte
Girardot) succeeds in gaining Gil's trust by meeting him on his own
ground, thereby providing the boy with a way out of his Kafkaesque
impasse. The characterisation of Bouchitey and Girardot's
characters appears naive to an adult viewer, but we must recognise that
this is how Gil sees them, the one an ogre to be resisted at all costs,
the other a kindly guide who is there to help him make sense of the
adult world. Sussfeld's simplistic approach to cinema was
far less successful on his previous films than it is here, effectively
offering a child's eye view of the world, with its fleeting pleasures
and barbed injustices. Sussfeld catches the essence of Buten's
novel without resorting to the kind of cinematic grandstanding that was
becoming prevalent in France in the mid-1990s. We can
forgive the film its somewhat twee ending because it is such a tender
homage to Albert Lamorisse's
Crin blanc (1953), one of
cinema's most intense evocations of childhood.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
In the 1960s, Gil is eight years old, a boy who is forever locked in
his own dreamworld. A hyper-sensitive, hyper-imaginative child,
he is already in love, with a little girl called Jessica. Gil's
unusual behaviour is so troubling that he is admitted to a specialist
psychiatric clinic, where experts try to make sense of his condition
and tame his excesses...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.