BLAME Canada?
Not if you’ve seen “Set Me Free” (“Emporte-moi”), a lyrical and beautifully acted export from our neighbors to the north.
Young Karine Vanasse is extraordinary as 13-year-old Hanna, whose onset of puberty only adds to her confusion about her identity in 1963 Quebec.
Asked to give her religion at school, she offers an embarrassed explanation that her father is a Polish Jew and her mom, to whom he’s not married, is a Catholic of French descent.
Things are not happy at home. Dad (Miki Manojlovic), an embittered, abusive leftist and Holocaust survivor, can’t keep a job and spends his days playing chess. Mom (Pascale Bussieres), an overworked seamstress, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The film is a triumph for writer-director Lea Pool, who handles Hanna’s crises with rare sensitivity and restraint. This is nowhere more obvious than in a sequence where Hanna gives into advances by a flirtatious female classmate (Charlotte Christeler) she meets at a dance.
Pool also offers a very effective homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film “My Life to Live” (“Vivre Sa Vie”). Hanna is seen several times watching the film’s flickering black-and-white images in a darkened theater and identifying with its heroine, a doomed prostitute played by the beautiful Anna Karina, who resembles Hanna’s teacher (Nancy Huston).
“Set Me Free,” which was featured at last year’s New York Film Festival, tells its story so effectively through pictures it’s barely necessary to read the subtitles.
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SET ME FREE
Lyrical, beautifully acted and shot coming-of-age story centering on a 13-year-old girl (the extraordinary Karine Vanasse) and her dysfunctional family in 1963 Quebec. Running time: 94 minutes. Not rated. In French with English subtitles. At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.