Jacques Doillon's Ponette: The Perennial Mourning Child

Ponette, Jacques Doillon's 1996 film, while little noticed in the United States, is much admired in Europe and repays attention as a compelling treatment of a child's grief at the death of a parent or parents. ¹ The impact of the film is heightened for us through awareness of its clearly intended echoes of and contrasts with a classic French film, René Clément's 1952 Jeux Interdits, or Forbidden Games. ² While literary analogies are not lacking, ³ Ponette achieves its greatest richness of meaning for us when juxtaposed both with the earlier film and with the psychological literature on bereavement in children. In referring to this literature, I will emphasize the work of J. William Worden because of his comprehensive synthesis of the field and the special pertinence of his analyses. ⁴

Doillon's film opens with the very young girl Ponette (played by four-year-old Victoire Thivisol), hospitalized and sucking her thumb, her arm in a cast as a result of the auto accident, which, we learn, has killed her mother. She is with a man who, we realize, is her father, and who, we gradually surmise, was separated or divorced from her mother. His love for the child mingles with his angrily bittersweet grief for the dead woman. Unable to live with her father, Ponette is sent to live with her aunt and her cousins, then to a school or colonie de vacances (both her aunt's house and the school are in the countryside). Although suffering unbearably, in part because of the frequent absences of her father, the girl works through her mourning largely by means of the ministry of other children and their games and rituals. At the end of the film she seems to achieve reconciliation through a stunning gravesite visitation from her dead mother, followed by the arrival of her father.

Ponette is shot in color, which—when contrasted with the almost preternatural black and white photography of Jeux Interdits—emphasizes the film's realistic treatment of its theme in the contemporaneous context of our world. Many other features underline the similarities and differences between the two films.

In Ponette we seem far from the peasant setting under German bombardment in the World War II countryside of Jeux Interdits. Yet in the opening scene of Jeux Interdits, a German attack causes a spectacular pileup of vehicles of every kind, then, immediately after, the death of the parents of Paulette, a young girl about five years old (played by Brigitte Fossey). The resemblance between her name and the idiosyncratically named Ponette cannot be missed.

Paulette witnesses the death of her parents but is not herself injured. As she leaves their bodies, she gently touches the cheek of her dead mother but thereafter seems more preoccupied by the death of her dog. Taken in by a neighboring family, she assuages her grief in rituals of animal burial and in games shared with their youngest child, Michel. Amid the horror of war and death, there is solace, found in both the agrarian environment and Catholic religious ritual. But, at the end of the film, separated from Michel and the rest of his family by the authorities and intended for an orphanage, Paulette finds herself in a church thronged with refugees. She screams, "Michel!" Then, for the first and last time, she cries out "Maman!" before running away in search of her mother and disappearing from our view into the crowd.

This dreadful ending, befitting the historical circumstances of Jeux Interdits, differs from the setting and, in particular, the concluding resolution of Ponette. Nevertheless, there are underlying continuities between the two films: the pastoral frame, the prominence but inefficacy of religious explanations and consolations, and the fractures characteristic of modern society that exacerbate earlier alienations—separated and divorced parents, the distances of work and travel, and, indeed, the omnipresence of rapid automobile travel that is itself the cause of Ponette's terrible...