Winter Film Festival 2008 @ Galaxy Theatre

Set in the mid-sixties, Léa Pool's vibrant and beautifully crafted Maman est chez le coiffeur focuses on teenaged Élise, who is about to realize that the adult world is not exactly what she thought or hoped it would be. Her principal instructors are her father, the local doctor, and her mother, a frustrated career woman and part-time journalist. A rift between mother and daughter has been growing for a long time, and when a frustrated Élise is disciplined, she begins meddling, sparking her mother's abrupt and angry departure. While the impact of this absence is disastrous for them all, it is especially devastating for Élise, who is now forced to care for her father and brothers.

Superficially, this may seem like a coming-of-age story, but Pool is more interested in the separate unsustainable worlds inhabited by men and women in the years before feminism. The women in the film are frustrated and bored, with either too much time on their hands or no space (mental or physical) to call their own. The men may have some of their immediate needs cared for, but they're not exactly better off.

These inherent fissures in the family structure and the makeshift solutions people come up with have only consigned the children to neglect. Ironically, the kids' world is persistently invaded by the adults. When a friend, in a gesture that is somehow both innocent and prurient, invites Élise and her oldest brother to see his aunt naked, the prank turns comically horrifying. (The scene restages Jeffrey's trip to the closet in Blue Velvet, minus David Lynch's Gothic surrealism.)

Throughout, Pool opts for a languid, summery tone, a perfect counterpoint to Élise's tumultuous mindset. As Élise grows somewhat reluctantly more aware of what is going on around her, the atmosphere of the film seems timeless, paradoxically intensifying our sense that time is passing quickly. The film is far from a tract: vital and very funny, it is a perfect companion piece to Pool's last masterpiece, Emporte-moi. What is most unnerving about it, however, is that her fictional world doesn't exactly feel like a distant mirror. In fact, it seems very close to our own.

Steve Gravestock

Credits

Production Company: Les Productions Équinoxe 

Producer: Lyse Lafontaine, Michael Mosca 

Screenplay: Isabelle Hébert 

Production Designer: Patrice Bengle 

Cinematographer: Daniel Jobin 

Editor: Dominique Fortin 

Sound: Thierre Morlaas-Lurbe, Claude Beaugrand, Luc Boudrias 

Music: Laurent Eyquem 

Principal Cast:

Céline Bonnier

Laurent Lucas

Marianne Fortier

Gabriel Arcand

Rated: PG

Runtime: 98min

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