Blame It on Fidel (La Faute a Fidel)
They're the words no bourgeois grandparent wants to hear: "Who are the communists, Grandma?" But Anna, the relentlessly inquisitive 9-year-old played by Nina Kervel in Julie Gavras's "Blame It on Fidel," needs to know. It's 1970, and she's the daughter of middle-class French intellectuals who supported revolution in both Latin America and Spain, but a trip to Chile compels them to be more directly involved. Soon their Parisian apartment becomes a meeting place for revolutionaries working to get Salvador Allende elected in Santiago. And, brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.
"Blame It on Fidel" is told entirely from Anna's point of view (often the camera pulls in tight enough to crop the adults' heads out of the frame). She sees everything and wants explained what she doesn't understand, like communism. When she asks what communists want, her mother's mother (Martine Chevallier), a dignified but not outrageously fancy woman, doesn't miss a beat: "Everything."
Another, more infuriated explanation comes from one of Anna's nannies (Marie-Noelle Bordeaux). An exiled Cuban who had to flee when Castro took power, she says the communists are bearded nomads who don't believe in God. When Anna asks an actual communist, she's answered with one of the metaphors in the movie that challenge her Catholic upbringing: an orange, whose sections, he says, the communists want to share with everyone.
You can see Anna taking all this in and considering it, in the same way she appears to have absorbed the birds and bees (she knows all about them). Kervel has an amazing face for that sort of processing. The stillness that comes over it is not blankness but thought. She and Gavras (the daughter of the leftist filmmaker Costa-Gavras) create an emotionally translucent soul. This is a girl who keeps her feelings private but by no means is she withdrawn. The toll her parents' ideas takes on her is evident, but the movie doesn't call on her to dramatize unhappiness. When something bugs her she'll let you know, whether you're her father or the rigid nun teaching her at an all-girls school.
Anna's mother, Marie (Julie Depardieu), is a journalist, and her daughter overhears the interviews she's doing for a magazine cover story about abortion. She hears about the fraught relationship her father, Fernando (Stefano Accorsi), has with his Spanish family. He smuggled out his sister (Mar Sodupe) and her young daughter (Raphaëlle Molinier) after she lost her husband while he fought Franco's regime. Fernando feels guilty about not having himself fought. Anna can smell the contradiction on him. Her questions about his political imperfections only sound innocent. She's searching for the meaning in his actions. In doing so, she might be better at her mother's job than her mother. The movie can't make us privy to whether Fernando and Marie mull the effect their politics have on Anna and her younger brother. But we can only assume there was some conversation about the possible side effects of, say, that anti-Franco political rally they took the kids to, the one that ends in mass chaos and tear gas.
Gavras, who adapted the movie with Arnaud Cathrine from Domitilla Calamai's Italian novel, plays the film as a light but pivotal struggle for Anna to accept disillusionment with a modicum of grace. For Gavras, the loss of political innocence is a triumphant enrichment. It doesn't deprive Anna of her childhood. It deepens it. She doesn't rebel, and yet her refusal to remain as delightfully nonplussed as her brother, Francois (Benjamin Feuillet), keeps her in a state of interrogative recalcitrance. Although it's Francois who has to remind her, when he suggests they "play Allende and Franco," that Franco is not the good guy in his game. But Anna gets to the bottom of that with her cousin.
This little girl has some impressive cinematic cousins, too, each in some way affected by Franco's regime. There's the questing Ofelia of Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and the less-aware bucolic Spanish sisters in Victor Erice's "The Spirit of the Beehive." What is it about little girls and Franco that brings out the best in filmmakers?
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ movienation.
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