Nana (2011)

Saying that children are innocent is the same as saying that animals are innocent. It’s a generous assessment but ignores that, regardless of environmental influence, both animals and children exist—rightly—in their own blunt, half-formed reveries. Nana confirms this in a rather surprising way: a mother takes her young child out to a cabin in the woods under the pretense of starting a new life there but then promptly commits suicide. The mother is portrayed as unstable from the start (there’s something unsettling in the way she scrawls a note to her father in crayon), but her daughter has an existence that remains strangely separate from her mother’s actions. While most films would see this sort of existence merely as a consequence of her abandonment, Nana suggests that the intense and particular life of the daughter’s mind is not so simply explained away.

This suggestion is largely stylistic, for the film’s favored setup is to have an immobile camera unobtrusively watch the daughter from a distance while she is left to her own devices. Immersed fully in her environment, she seems entirely unaware of the camera’s presence, talking and playing as if the whole world were her self. So when she is left almost entirely alone by her mother’s death (for a time—days? weeks?), it comes not as a shock but as a rather comfortable confirmation that the profane voices in her head are much more real than the insubstantial bodies passing through her line of vision.