Sandrine Bonnaire’s directorial debut and winner of the FIPRESCI Award at the Cannes Film Festival 2007 is a moving portrait of her sister Sabine; it’s also a documentary which reflects the director’s experience of working with some of France’s foremost directors, including Pialat, Varda, Leconte and Chabrol. It recalls Stefano Rulli’s documentary about his autistic son, A Private Silence (Un Silenzio Particolare) (2004) and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) (2007) in its themes of family, loss and dependency. It differs from them in its critique of a mental health system which delayed diagnosis and failed to provide adequate care.

Grainy home-movie images suggest it’s not just historical distance that separates past and present. They contextualise a woman who has essentially become a different person, or who has, in the words of a psychiatrist, suffered a loss of personality. Sandrine Bonnaire’s film resonates with the attempt to recover a sense of the person her sister was and the hope that in a therapeutic setting she might recover some of the abilities and spirit of her girlhood.

In the home-movies we see Sabine as a beautiful teenager, bikini-clad and frolicking at the seaside, playing the piano at home or chatting excitedly as a plane comes in to land at a holiday destination. We learn that when her siblings left home her mother became unable to cope with Sabine’s bizarre behaviour and she was eventually hospitalised. What happened during those five years, when Sabine was heavily sedated and restrained, isn’t fully revealed, although we learn she was sedated and restrained and that she gained 30 kilos.

The director’s tone in voice-over conveys the sense of loss as much as the settings and the occasionally bleached-out images. Reinforced by a nostalgic piano soundtrack, shots of the attractive young girl are juxtaposed with the present-day 38 year old Sabine at a care facility: drowsy, overweight and drooling; given to outbursts of self-harming and hitting.

The facility, set up and largely funded by the director and her supporters is in a pleasant rural location near Charente. The regime includes gardening, interaction with animals, a visit to a local swimming baths, playing music and communal dining. Sabine and her three or four fellow inmates at the facility are cajoled and managed through the day’s activities. Seeing Sabine swearing at the pool attendant and her reluctance to participate in physical tasks, either through tiredness or dislike, we come to understand the burden of care that is demanded. Her constant need to be reassured that her sister will be around that day and the next is harrowing, and, as her sister remarks in a rare shot where they are seen together, exhausting for Sandrine.


The personal involvement of the director is apparent throughout: she interprets images from her sister’s past in voiceover or we hear dialogue between the young Sabine and Sandrine. Although we merely observe the daily routines of the half dozen patients and their carers and listen to their interactions, Sabine constantly speaks directly to her sister, present behind the camera, as do the other interviewees.

The mother of a severely epileptic thirty-year old testifies to the guilt suffered by family members and the stultifying effects of drug therapy. A psychiatrist names Sabine’s condition as one of psycho-infantilism with autistic syndrome, a diagnosis that was not made in Sabine’s childhood. In part an indictment of the failure of a national system, the film also shows the high cost of staffing and running a facility and the patience and skill required by carers. Some of the most distressing moments occur when Sabine seeks repeated assurance that her sister will be staying until bedtime and returning next day.


Perhaps the most moving scene occurs towards the end of the film when Sabine is watching some of the footage of herself as a girl. When Sandrine offers to stop because her sister is crying she says that they are ‘tears of joy’ and asks to see the film again. Despite the ambivalence, Sabine’s feelings echo those of the director and the audience: what has been lost needn’t have been lost so completely had better care been available. It is at moments like this that the film transcends the genre; it is not just a documentary but an elegy to the past and to film's role in recalling it.













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UK Release: June 20th 2008