Set Me Free

by Sam Adams

Given that within a minute of the film’s opening, young Hanna (Karine Vanasse) has emerged from the ocean and dripped the blood of her first period onto her feet, it’s not hard to guess that Set Me Free is a coming-of-age story, nor that Hanna is in for a pretty bumpy ride. Indeed, within the next hour, she’s been slapped around by her father and molested by several men, shared kisses with both her brother and her female best friend, been taunted with anti-Semitic slurs and had several epiphanies while watching Godard’s Vivre sa Vie. Clearly director and co-writer Léa Pool isn’t after subtleties of plot: Nearly every cliché of the feminist bildungsroman is here, from the awkwardness with which Hanna’s grandmother explains the advent of her menstrual cycle (see, women’s sexuality is repressed!) to the way Hanna watches her hard-working mother struggle with an abusive "artist" of a father who stays at home while his wife toils in a factory, then makes her type out his poems when she returns at night.

Set in 1960s Québec, Set Me Free brims with Gallic self-seriousness and an utter lack of self-consciousness about the ground that has been trod before it. When brief flashes of pop intrude, as when children dance to Dion’s "Runaround Sue" at a clandestine basement party, it feels like someone’s lighting off fireworks in church, since the mood Pool has established seems so alien to the pleasures of childhood. The director makes sure Hanna has it rough: She’s a working-class Jewish bisexual bastard (her bohemian parents aren’t married) with an abusive father and a suicidal mother. Why, you wonder, didn’t she give her a limp or a cleft palate? That’s not to say that Hanna spends the whole film crying her eyes out. That, of course, would be too sentimental — too, well, American. Instead, she lowers her eyes beneath her Anna Karina bob, watching passively as things continually fail to get better.

The point isn’t that Pool should be required to sentimentalize childhood à la Spielberg, but that in reducing her story to a series of unpleasantnesses, she reduces the audience’s involvement to waiting restlessly for the next shoe to drop. It reminds me of Mike Leigh’s Naked, where Katrin Cartlidge’s character is raped with such regularity that after a certain point all you can think is "Here we go again." When Hanna’s father orders her to go the bakery to replace a loaf that’s more air than bread, she complains that the baker’s "a creep" and her father slaps her. Then she goes to the bakery, and sure enough the baker, after seeming to express concern for the welt on her cheek, feels her up in the back room.

Perhaps in some circles this passes for deep or true, but it’s just as sentimental in its own way as Peter Pan. You know there’s some form of empowerment coming at the film’s end, some way for Hanna to take control of her situation and therefore, supposedly, put herself on the road to a better life. (And wouldn’t you know it, said empowerment comes in the form of a movie camera.) But Set Me Free conflates self-empowerment and adolescent rebellion to the extent that we’re meant to think anything Hanna does under her own steam is a step toward adulthood.

Like a mantra, the film returns again and again to Anna Karina’s café monologue from Vivre sa Vie, which lays out identity in simple existentialist terms. "I am responsible," she intones over and over again. "If I raise my hand, I am responsible. If I am unhappy, I am responsible." For all its portentousness, this isn’t so far from the self-help wackos who claim that all physical illness is merely a manifestation of psychic woes. (Thus, apparently, cancer patients are merely folks who couldn’t get their heads together.) It’s just the sort of reductive and overtly absurd philosophy adolescents are drawn to, and it makes perfect sense that Hanna would latch on to it, obsessed as she is with disconnecting from her surroundings. (From the first shot on, she’s repeatedly shown holding her breath underwater, floating listlessly as if dead.) But surely it wouldn’t have been too intrusive for Set Me Free to acknowledge somehow, some way, the silliness of its heroine’s philosophy. The closest we get is a teacher, who’s read an essay of Hanna’s parroting Karina’s words, telling her she has to come up with her own ideas.

"Unhappy childhood" is practically a redundant phrase, at least until you get older and more forgiving, so it seems silly for Pool to stack the deck against poor Hanna the way she does. I recently had the odd experience of sifting through a decade-plus’ worth of old school papers, and I found that the further back they went, the more placid I was about what now seem to be the horrors of childhood. That’s not to say I didn’t have horrors of my own then, but rather that nostalgia works both ways: Not only do things that were bad seem better, but things that weren’t so bad seem worse. The things we as adults wish we’d had as children aren’t the things we wanted then, but Set Me Free so collapses Hanna’s transition into adulthood that you expect her to start looking into 401(k) plans.

There’s nothing in Set Me Free that takes on a child’s perspective as vividly as The 400 Blows or Hope and Glory. Pool does come close once, when she cuts from Anna Karina dancing round a bar in Vivre sa Vie to Hanna dancing to her brother’s percussion ensemble; she mimics Karina’s pole-dance, but Hanna’s smile is all childish glee without Karina’s streetwise come-on. But Pool’s movie is too dour for children and too simplistic for adults. Even a self-serious teen like Hanna might recognize that sometimes you have to spread things on with a knife instead of a trowel.