Sometimes it’s the children who make the films. We only have to think of Haley Joel Osment’s performances in The Sixth Sense (1999), by Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine (2006) or Milo Machado-Graner in Anatomy of a fall (2023), all three of which shocked moviegoers of all generations around the world.
Little Louise Mauroy-Panzani, who plays the main role ofAma Gloria, is of this caliber. In almost every shot, the little girl embodies childhood in all its brutal honesty, making the viewer go from laughter to tears in the blink of an eye.
The young actress takes on the features of Cléo, six years old, a child raised since birth by her nanny Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego), originally from Cape Verde. The latter represents a maternal figure for Cléo, who did not know her biological mother, who died of cancer. When Gloria is urgently called back to her native country to bury her mother and take care of her two children left on the island, she invites the little one to come and spend the summer with her with her family, before saying goodbye for good.
Cape Verde will be for Cléo the place of all learning, while she will taste independence and discovery, will tame the codes of an unknown culture and language and will experiment, exacerbated by the arrival of a new baby in the family, the greatest loss of childhood: the realization that the world does not revolve exclusively around you.
Camera on the shoulder, riveted close to the faces and bodies, the filmmaker accompanies the slightest thrills and impressions of her heroine, often choosing to place the latter outside the action, in the position of the one who receives, analyzes, reacts, silently or overwhelmed by emotions and lack of control; nuances rendered in a moving truth by Louise Mauroy-Panzani.
This posture makes it possible to depict Cape Verdean daily life with a freedom free from judgment and exoticization to which only the gaze of childhood can consent, in addition to capturing the simplicity and tenderness that emanates from the exchanges between the child and his nanny. The duo of actresses, although not professional, demonstrates an exemplary naturalness, which supports the emergence of candid moments which almost seem caught by chance.
These realistic sequences are interspersed with aerial animated interludes which take the form of moving canvases, which show the child’s interiority and find their justification as the story progresses.
Through the banal story with melodramatic accents of a last goodbye, Marie Amachoukeli does not just arouse emotion. It also raises complex questions and issues left as a legacy of colonialism, recalling that everyone is instilled with a different perception of their place in the world, evoking the tears caused by economic immigration and questioning the value of love born of a transaction. A film to watch with lucidity… and a box of tissues.