The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
Earwig (2021).
There’s a moment in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s feverish 2021 psychodrama Earwig in which a man rifles through a small refrigerator, within it an icebox, and within that a stack of thick metallic cases, each one containing denture molds brimful of frozen saliva. Behind him sits a young girl in elaborate headgear, her small face flanked by tubes and two ampoules collecting her spit. The act is uncanny but clearly routine—a chilling, briefly expository moment that proffers countless questions and exemplifies Hadžihalilović’s aesthetic of reticence. Her films all possess this matryoshka-like effect, coming undone only to neatly curl back into themselves at will.
As female-driven body horror stipples its way into the mainstream, Hadžihalilović’s work feels all the more resonant and, perhaps most crucially, misprized. Hadžihalilović auteurism is marked by a number of thematic signifiers: obedience, sex, puberty, mutilation, surveillance. Hers is a cinema of cloistered children, their caretakers, rituals, and the ominous higher-ups who tug the strings—a controlled mythos of defiant bodies perfused by prepubescent curiosity.
Hadžihalilović was born on May 7, 1961, in Lyon, France. She spent her first seventeen years living in Morocco before returning to Paris to study film at La Fémis, an elite state school then-funded by the Ministry of Culture, which received approximately 1,500 annual applicants for a coveted 36 slots. There, she made her first short film La première mort de Nono (1987), about a lovelorn young man who is hit on by an older man at a strange bar: a simple premise that prefigures Hadžihalilović’s inclination to carve out the bizarre within the mundane.
In the late 1980s, Hadžihalilović began collaborating with her now-spouse Gaspar Noé. She assisted on Noé’s first short Tintarella di luna (1985) and he was subsequently the camera operator on Nono. “We discovered that we shared a desire to make atypical films and we decided together to create our own society, Les Cinémas de la Zone, in order to finance our projects,” said Noé. Les Cinémas de la Zone became a small production hub for the pair, backing most of Noé’s work to date. Hadžihalilović has since produced Carne (1991), I Stand Alone (1998), Lux Æterna (2019), and Vortex (2021), as well as contributing to the screenplay for Enter the Void (2009).
Hadžihalilović is often placed in conversation with New French Extremity, a movement of transgressive French filmmakers at the cusp of the new millennium: Noé, Leos Carax, Catherine Breillat, François Ozon, Bruno Dumont. Their films toy with sexual decadence, violence, and a naturalized ugliness. Though less incendiary than some of her peers, Hadžihalilović subscribed to the provocative, unsanitized methodology of the movement, as evinced by her early work.
LA BOUCHE DE JEAN-PIERRE AND GOOD BOYS USE CONDOMS
La bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996).
35 years into her career, Hadžihalilović’s visual parlance has not varied considerably. Take La bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996), her first film post-Nono: a viridescent anti-fairy tale about a young girl, Mimi (Sandra Sammartino), who is sent to live with her aunt Solange (Denise Aron-Schropfer) after she witnesses her mother attempt suicide. It contains several formal flavors present in her latest effort Earwig, from a hedged-in, imperiled youth to a shadowy palette of pale yellows and bottle greens. (Jean-Pierre was also shot by Noé, his grotty cinematographic texture signalizing Mimi’s miserable little world.)
Hadžihalilović’s scope was tighter then, less attuned to landscapes as expositions of bodily repression—a trait exemplified in Evolution (2015) and Earwig—and more fixated on the body itself. In Jean-Pierre, this meant extreme close-ups of intubation tubes, characters fiddling with their nail beds, slipping pills between their lips, and watching or partaking in sexual acts.
In the film, Mimi initially appears unshaken by her mother’s near-death experience, puttering around the apartment and familiarizing her dolls with their new home. But after witnessing Solange and her boyfriend Jean-Pierre having sex one night, she is slowly pried away from her innocent sensibilities and plopped into decidedly adult spheres of action. Jean-Pierre abuses her, she befriends her twenty-something-year-old neighbors, and eventually overdoses on sleeping pills and has to have her stomach pumped, just as her mother did.
The observed sex act itself is significant: Jean-Pierre is dominant, thrusting violently and pulling Solange’s hair while she lies underneath practically still, her face contorting from apathy to discomfort. With the exception of her hand briefly grazing his back, the scene’s movement is commanded entirely by Jean-Pierre’s sexual impulses. She tells him to stop and he carries on unperturbed by her request, presaging his ensuing molestation of Mimi and Solange’s incapacity to intervene.
Through Mimi, Hadžihalilović asks us to envision how such a nonconsensual image might register in the mind of a child. “I guess I’m very interested in making films about children, probably around nine or ten, when it’s a moment when you begin to question yourself and what is around you, but you’re still very much a child,” Hadžihalilović has said. “For some personal reason, I’m very interested in the thoughts, the fear, the expectations, the emotions of that age.”
Jean-Pierre somewhat gratuitously marked the beginning of Hadžihalilović’s cyclicity: characters (mostly children) are removed from their homes and placed in the care of strangers, inevitably enduring abuse and thinly-veiled sexual discovery. As she sinks into a chronic sleep, Mimi has odious visions of Jean-Pierre’s mouth and her old bedroom door. Connoting forlorn privacy and innocence, the door is notably shut, a marker of Mimi’s compartmentalization and an actuation of Hadžihalilović’s bleak, hellish cycles. Another defining Hadžihalilovićian trait is her propensity for feedback loops, with beginnings and endings melting into one another, such as Mimi and her mother’s suicide attempts bookending Jean-Pierre.
Hadžihalilović’s next project breaks from the preteen mold, though she foregrounds her adult players with the same dissective, intimate approach. In 1998, she directed Good Boys Use Condoms for a series of four commercial short films depicting safe sexual practices—all crafted by young, non-pornographic directors, with a combined production grant of $210,000 from Canal Plus and the French government. In the film, a young man has sex with identical twins, each time removing and putting on a fresh condom. (It somewhat shockingly aired on French television, nudity et al.)
Shot with low-budget pornographic conventions, Good Boys opens with an aerial shot of an erect penis rolled over by a rubber. As the pair have missionary sex, Hadžihalilović frames their faces in close-up, the two blissfully engaged in the act. She then cuts to an image of the woman on a toilet afterward (why not chuck in a helpful “pee after sex to avoid STIs” precept?) as the man fornicates with another woman in the background. The first woman returns and eagerly joins the pair in bed before the film’s pedagogy is stated plainly by the second one: “Change condom.” The camera orbits the bedroom walls for the film’s final minute as the twins alternate giving the man a handjob, a vigorous, discordant sequence that proudly climaxes in the most literal sense.
There have been comparisons between Good Boys and Noé’s pornographic short film from that same year, Sodomites, which featured a man dressed as a minotaur having anal sex with an eager, leather-clad woman in front of a rowdy audience—the connection here being that the creature carefully puts on a condom and lubrication before the action. Hadžihalilović and Noé certainly have fingerprints on each other’s work, though their approaches here couldn’t be more varied. Sodomites is brash and stroboscopic, outlandish for laughs. In Good Boys, sex is pleasurable in excess; the polyamorous implications of a man concurrently cycling through twin sexual partners is at most amusing, but not shameful; voyeuristic, but not exploitative. The didactic efforts of the film feel baked into the erotic action, rather than prescriptive PSAs about protection.
Good Boys is perhaps the biggest thematic outlier of Hadžihalilović’s oeuvre—a literalization of her typically notional sensualities—but its muted peculiarities and shifting tempo recall its maker’s gifts: a cold intimacy, flecked with disorienting images, mutually inviting and demanding. In Jean-Pierre, this might have been the sight of Mimi curled up in the hallway after overdosing or tight shots of her intubated throat; in Good Boys, this is a penis ejaculating into the closing credits.
INNOCENCE AND EVOLUTION
Innocence (2004).
Hadžihalilović’s following two features, Innocence (2004) and Evolution, rhyme with one another, both tales about the manipulation of prepubescent bodies. The pair of films are in their own ways “pubertycore,” expounding their narratives through characters’ metamorphosing. To Hadžihalilović, these bodies are a site for investigating obedience, punishment, and mutilation, an approach that could easily veer into exploitation but instead bolsters the director’s larger design: probing the effects of authoritarian institutions on those most vulnerable to them.
Innocence is the most critically acclaimed of Hadžihalilović’s works, the one which made her the first female director to win the Bronze Horse, the award for Best Film at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s novella Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, Innocence surveys a group of girls attending a secluded boarding school. Though Wedekind’s story is a clear satire of gender and sexual norms, Hadžihalilović enacts it like a broken fairy tale, equal parts wondrous and woeful. Six-year-old Iris (Zoé Auclair) emerges from a coffin in the middle of the dormitory (as is standard procedure, apparently) and is greeted by her new roommates, who impart to her the school rules. Satiny ribbons connote age and grade: red for the youngest and violet for the oldest; no boys allowed; nobody leaves the premises.
Punishment is a valuable currency within these walls, with the girls pondering whether escaping from school grounds could result in the breaking of a leg or worse. Laura, the former eldest, drowns during a rowboat escape attempt and another manages to scale the stone wall that encloses the property, but a gunshot is heard seconds later. A violet-ribboned girl tells Iris that the school’s employees were all former students who failed to escape and are now locked into service here as penance.
Where Jean-Pierre is ugly, Innocence is resplendent, all pigtails and leotards, thick forestial planes, and handsome theaters shot by Benoît Debie (a frequent Noé collaborator) in Super 16 using CinemaScope. Hadžihalilović is no less biting, though, still invested in the limits of the body and the ubiquity of abuse, only now with more subtlety. These young girls are perpetually unsafe, scrutinized, and surveilled—their days are comprised mostly of ballet lessons with Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard), during which they rehearse rigorously for a grand performance. When they finally perform on stage, the house lights are down, obscuring the audience from view. The girls plié and pirouette dressed as butterflies—a sartorial signifier of their transmogrifying—unaware that their patrons are adult men until one of them tosses a rose at a dancer and proclaims she’s the “most beautiful.” These perverse recitals fund the school.
Eventually, a new coffin springs up in the dormitory and the older girls remove their purple ribbons and board a night train. Now free to roam in a nondescript urban space, they plunge into a fountain where one of them locks eyes with an older boy through the spurting water. Though Hadžihalilović leaves the rationale for the older girls’ departure ambiguous, in Mine-Haha, they are placed on an underground train to the outside world upon the onset of their first menstruation.
The fountain is a site of cleanliness and effectual baptism, rinsing the screen of its prior transgressions and releasing the girls from their hermetic socialization. Innocence is a formally beautified representation of impurity, and it’s not until this moment of dual autonomy and sexual revelation that the film’s visuals align with its objectives. Much like Good Boys, it ends with a phallic eruption, a shot of gushing water that also opens the film—a now-contextualized assurance of the director’s circularity.
Here, Hadžihalilović plays with ritual, routine, and repetition, motifs that would subsequently define her following two features. This scene is also an example of Hadžihalilović’s proclivity for invoking offscreen characters through shape and sound: “The air bubbles recall the star-shaped breathing hole [in Iris’ coffin], invoking Iris’ presence without representing her on screen, while the sounds of submergence tend to suggest the water’s encompassing of her body and its sensation of depth,”1 writes Davina Quinlivan of Kingston University.
Evolution (2015).
Evolution develops on the somatic resonance of Innocence tenfold. It is a loamy, abundant film text that conjures questions about experimentation and sacrifice, folded into the gender politics of a coastal island populated exclusively by mothers and their young sons. A deviation from Hadžihalilović’s examinations of young girls, Evolution follows Nicolas (Max Brebant), a sickly boy who happens upon a dead body and slowly begins to question his entire existence on the island.
The film’s setting—Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, with black volcanic sand and infinite starfish—is the perfect playground for these frail boys. Though shot digitally, Hadžihalilović worked to texturize the images in post-production: “That was what we were always looking for, texture all the time—texture with the sun, texture with the set, on the actual image and material. We tried to get that ‘ethereal but also concrete at the same time’ feeling.” The result is a setting that appears both polished and granulated, a fitting encapsulation of the dual natural and unnatural elements at play on the island.
When Nicolas asks his mother why he’s sick, she replies, “Because at your age, your body is changing and weakening.” She feeds him bluish, wormy sludge and adds four black droplets of “medicine” to his water, another bizarre, unnerving ritual. Nicolas soon ends up in a subterranean hospital—recalling the tenebrous corridors of Jean-Pierre—where a doctor operates on his stomach, afterward placing him in a room full of boys with identical incisions. Meanwhile, in a secluded ward, the nurses watch tapes of cesarean births.
Nicolas is warier of his circumstances than the other boys, and as Innocence would tell us, curiosity necessitates punishment. After sneaking out of the hospital, he spies on the matriarchs—among them his mother—convening at night on the beach, naked and orgasmically writhing around the muddy shore. An overhead shot reveals the women’s bodies assuming the shape of a starfish. Thus begins a two-pronged reveal: Nicolas is given an ultrasound, during which a fetus’s heartbeat is heard, and his friend Victor dies on the operating table after the extraction of a small creature from his belly. The boys are essentially lab rats for male pregnancy, kidnapped and relocated to the island to be probed and plumped.
This explains all the starfish—the physical as well as the symbolic, like the echinoderm-shaped surgical light or the suckers appearing on the mothers’ bodies. Male starfish can reproduce asexually through fission, the kind of scientific spectacle the islanders aspire to with their stolen boys. Art historian Nicole Elizabeth Cook remarks on the transgressive implications of this plot twist: “Gradually, we begin to see that their goal for genetic modification—for an evolutionary marriage between humans and sea life—is an attempt to upend the status quo of the exclusively female fragility of human childbirth and expand procreation possibilities.”2
Evolution (2015).
Hadžihalilović again sees the changing body as a vehicle for social interrogation and nature as a kinetic abstraction by which these bodies are measured. Evolution is the director at her most visceral, the same disturbing cycles as Jean-Pierre and Innocence stretched into a bio-horror bodywork reminiscent of New French Extremity. Interestingly, as Hadžihalilović’s narratives become increasingly macabre, her aesthetics soften: fewer jump cuts, cleaner landscapes, a cooler palette. So when she does deploy horror tropes—a young boy splayed across an operating table; the squelch of naked women rubbing themselves with a squid—they itch to the bone.
The move from naturalism to the occult is itself a kind of filmic mutation or pubescence, arguably inevitable for a director who never quite played it straight. Jean-Pierre and Good Boys tease out the grotesque from the human—both set inside tiny apartments, the films’ perversity and carnal ugliness are distinctly localized—but Evolution trickily keeps naturalism at the fore. While the film is narratively the farthest from real-world plausibility, Hadžihalilović’s habit of cutting together images of sea and sky with alien fetuses rouses the same unease as her earlier work; her verisimilar environments suddenly become hazardous, whether by way of loitering pervs or slimy, ungodly creatures broiling in little boys’ stomachs.
The film’s coda closely resembles that of Innocence, with Nicolas loaded into a rowboat by an empathetic nurse and floating toward an urban city. To escape, the nurse (who, like all of the island women, has adapted to breathe underwater) clings to Nicolas, embracing his mouth so that he can breathe; the shot is uncomfortably long, the third predatory intimation in Hadžihalilović’s oeuvre used to connote burgeoning sexuality. Like the fountain’s sexually-charged splashes, the diegetic industrial moans of the city connote a “new cycle” for these preadolescents—the kind which Nicolas’s pretend mother explains is typical of molting lizards, crabs, and children.
EARWIG
Earwig (2021).
Post-Evolution, Hadžihalilović appeared to be widening her scope with each project: first an apartment, then a dormitory school, then an entire island. But with Earwig, her first English-language film, she again pulls us into the ugly, unsanitary innards of a relationship between a man and a child. A loose adaptation of Brian Catling’s 2019 novella, Earwig observes a toothless, ten-year-old shut-in, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), being provided for by Albert Scellinc (Paul Hilton), a stoic, middle-aged man, in postwar Europe. Though the pair seldom speak and the nature of their relationship is foggy, Mia’s wellbeing is paramount, evidenced by the mysterious man who calls to inquire about her sleeping patterns, appetite, and teeth. “All is as it should be,” replies Albert. One day, the voice on the other end of the phone instructs Albert to prepare Mia to leave, setting into motion Hadžihalilović’s pattern of isolated children inevitably plucked from their somber environments.
The macabre ritual of swapping out and fastening Mia’s ice teeth every few hours is mesmerizing. “There was a faith in the power of the images, an intensity and often poetry in silent film that is wonderful and that we have lost,” said Hadžihalilović. “Also, silent films can be really close to the language of dreams which is very appealing to me.” Hadžihalilović’s appreciation for the silent era is linked to her avoidance of scores; she’s right to value silence as a cinematic commodity, both to center attention on visual language and to create the kind of airless conditions Hadžihalilović likes to mold for her audience. Without the thick quietude, Earwig would be decidedly less eerie, or too self-serious to tow its trim, bizarre plot.
And, indeed, dreams are the meat of any Hadžihalilović film. Though she threads her stories along a tenable reality, Hadžihalilović is intent on wrinkling her realism with phantasm, just enough occlusion to make neither realm feel plausible enough. In a moment that exemplifies Hadžihalilović’s cinema of tragic miracles, Albert gets into a bar fight with another man and accidentally jams a broken bottle into the face of Céleste (Romola Garai), the beautiful barmaid and private object of his affection. Another scene set in a park sees Mia stare at her reflection in a pond before sinking into it headfirst, as if trying to conjoin her body with her echoed likeness.
As Emma Wilson of the University of Cambridge writes with regard to Innocence, Hadžihalilović confers “a collective child imaginary,”3 where warped, perverse environments enable shared delusions among her characters. What’s fascinating about Earwig, then, is that the childlike fantasies that Hadžihalilović limns are mostly Albert’s, not Mia’s. Here, the child imaginary is the anima of a 50-year-old man, enacted structurally and narratively through increasingly violent circumstances: his past, his guilt, the misery behind his every movement. Conversely, Mia is a perennial question mark whose icy fangs are never explained, her imagination never explored. Hadžihalilović’s misdirect here is almost mean, but a sharp reversal of her own auteurism; her inversion of motif amid a consistency in form—adult fare divulged through the dreamscape of a child—is a cogent reminder of her ability to forge new cycles.
Citing Rosalind Krauss’ notion of glace—the French term for glass, mirror, and ice; “transparency, opacity, and water”—film scholar Laura Staab submits that liquidity greatly informs Hadžihalilović’s narrative proclivities: “The watery, creaturely becomings of Innocence and Evolution take us towards the flow of birth, and Earwig points more towards that ‘freezing into stasis or death.’”4 Filtered through the wobbly national character of post-World War II Belgium, childbirth of any kind feels a little too precious. Albert is instead sampling death constantly—grieving, brutalizing, remembering.
And yet, death feels nonviable within the temporal loop Earwig sets for itself. The film eats its own tail, ending with Celeste slashing Albert’s cheek with a shattered bottle, then simultaneously gnawing at and embracing his gash. Where Jean-Pierre, Innocence, and Evolution (and even Good Boys) acknowledge their cycles by having characters escape their circumstances or repeat them altogether, Earwig precipitates events that have seemingly yet to occur, consigning its players to a hopeless rhythm of violence, torment, and thawing teeth.
Hadžihalilović’s work will continue to confound, her images to haunt, and her cycles to pestle our psyches. There’s no telling who the faceless higher-ups are or what they stand to gain from their covey of exploited children, but Hadžihalilović is not in the business of whodunits or handholding. Three decades in the making, her visual style has reflexively tilted into auteurism: a balance of hygienic conditions and dismal milieus, a cluster of whispers and groans, all taffy-pulled into a hallucinatory imaginary.
1. Quinlivan, Davina. “Material hauntings: The kinaesthesia of sound in Innocence.” Studies in French Cinema, 2009.
2. Cook, Nicole Elizabeth. “Talking to the Sea.” Film International Sept. 2019.
3. Wilson, Emma. “Miniature Lives, Intrusion, and Innocence: Women Filming Children.” French Cultural Studies, Feb. 2007.
4. Staab, Laura. “On Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig.” Another Gaze, June 2022.