Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n’iras pas danser)

Directed by Christophe Honore

(France, 2009)

This movie is for audiences who love relationship movies. The protagonist is Lena (Chiara Mastroianni), a recent divorcee who is cracking under the stress of managing life and young children on her own, determinedly on her own. Lena’s increasingly serious mental state endures as the salient impact of the movie, for everything else makes the audience wonder why a feature film had to be made to show this middle class French family’s particular relationships. Additionally, soon after the beginning, it’s a nagging distraction that Making Plans for Lena is a lot like the recent A Christmas Tale, by Arnaud Desplechin. And Mastroianni stars in that movie too. Both depict French families gathering for a holiday reunion, with one parent terminally ill. The individuals’ idiosyncrasies feed the films. In Lena, the family’s caring attention to farm animals and wildlife contrasts to their inability to love each other. In both movies, the mothers and siblings treat each other in the rudest, most discompassionate terms. Is this style of familial interaction a French cultural trait or something universal to the world? The characters’ brutally cutting remarks were startling to this viewer, and they created most of the film’s tension. Since no other side of the characters was developed—except possibly in Lena, though her personality disorder defined her—our hearts could not be moved for these people (nor for those in A Christmas Tale). Instead it was like witnessing privileged but unhappy lives, dysfunctional family relationships (which is fairly universal), and nasty verbal abuse.

As if the filmmaker was aware of the thinness of his material, he inserted a long fairy tale in the flashback mode. As Lena’s young son Anton reads to her from the book that’s kept him awake, the movie fades to the real life fairy tale of a privileged medieval woman who will marry only the man who can dance longer than she. We watch several contenders dance and die, until finally one dashing young man dances with the woman until she herself collapses. If this story was intended as a parallel to Lena’s story, it doesn’t work, though it helps to explain the French title Non ma fille, tu n’iras pas danser (No, my daughter (my girl), you won’t dance—i.e., destroy lives). By a stretch, we might connect Anton’s attempted suicide as his ill-fated dance with his mother.

Technically the movie was excellent as were the performances. Mastroianni plays a convincing role of a woman stressed beyond her mind’s ability to cope, and the consequences of that—the incremental steps to breakdown. There is no indication that Lena’s family knows how to get professional help for their collapsed daughter-sibling. The movie ends with Lena alone to work out her problems, but how, and at what cost to her children? The movie, like the family’s love, loyalty, and support, lacks strength and resolution.

For screening times visit the San Francisco International Film Festival http://fest10.sffs.org

© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

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