Louloute, or Louise, is nine years old and lives on the farm. Her parents, milk producers in debt and threatened by the industrialization of the sector, her older brother, her younger sister and the dog Soldat form her entourage, to which must be added a school friend with whom she is in love. In this setting of barns, animals and mud, Louloute asserts herself, rebellious and authentic, carried by a gentle melancholy that makes her unique.
The film would have told only the story of the girl and her family that it would have sketched a picture of rural life full of challenges. Nothing more. However, the Louloute scripted and directed by Hubert Viel goes beyond the simple and pretty rural setting. The third feature film by this filmmaker, little known here — his second, Girls in the Middle Ageswould however have been part, in 2015, of the already moribund FFM – tackles with delicacy, without sentimentality, the themes of (social) awakening, difference and (mental) health.
Work in two stages, that of Louise, a history teacher in a high school, and that of her childhood, thirty years earlier, Louloute alternates two realities, even merges them, at times, into a single shot. Everything seems to happen in the head of the double main character (or in front of his eyes). “As if at nine years old, I imagined a shitty future,” admits the adult, troubled by a tragedy that will have shaken up her life on the farm.
The director does not misuse either the “I” voice-over or a subjective camera. He bets on a multitude of ways, evoking the memory, the dream or the fabulation, without anyone knowing at what level one scene or another is located. What to think when the dog is called to take the chair, literally, of the absent dad?
A penchant for great realism, à la Maurice Pialat, and influenced, as he has already acknowledged, by the dreamlike nature of Hayao Miyazaki — but also by the female figures of the director of Princess Mononoke —, Viel succeeds in marrying genres without the whole thing collapsing. Between the town of Louise and the countryside of Louloute, between a course on democracy in Antiquity and a manual cow milking session, there is certainly a break, but this is explained and takes on meaning as as the story progresses.
The face and the presence of the solid and credible Alice Henri (Louloute, child) give the film its charm – as if we found the Ponette of Jacques Doillon, tears less. In joy as in dramatic shock, because there is drama, her character stands up like a rather mature little girl.
Humanist chronicle, with pinches of political commentary, Louloute mostly skims over his subjects. We are neither in The dismantling neither in Joker. Not monotonous, the story is notably punctuated by sequences featuring a surprising bestiary, like a rabbit coming out of the hat – or a chick, from the shell (instead of the egg to be cooked). And ends with an unexpected commentary on family love revealed by this note of nostalgia that showed up in the decors and colors of the 1980s.