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‘Little Girl Blue’ Review: Marion Cotillard Brings Emotional Color to a Poignant Hybrid Documentary
With help from Marion Cotillard, filmmaker Mona Achache artfully investigates the life and death of her mother Carole in 'Little Girl Blue.'
A writer, actor and photographer who was born into effective Left Bank intellectual royalty — Lange’s literary circles included Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, her father was celebrated science historian Jean-Jacques Salomon, her godfather was none other than William Faulkner — she never quite found her own footing in that world. Achache and editor Valérie Loiseleux deftly weave the film’s evidential fragments of the past — audio recordings, home movies, an avalanche of faded photographs — into a restless, flickering slideshow of recollection that often feels, however archivally rooted, emotively pulled from memory. This material thus takes on a bleary, amorphous quality that is atmospherically consistent with DP Noé Bach’s soft, low-lit lensing of the film’s dramatized portions, with the images sometimes appearing inky and tear-stained, deepening in intensity as Cotillard and her director find their way into Carole.
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