Ma vie de Courgette

Claude Barras (2016)

It takes a little time to get used to the combination of sight and sound in the Swiss director Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette.  In this stop-motion animation feature (though it runs only just over an hour), the dramatis personae have disproportionately large heads and extreme exophthalmia yet they’re voiced realistically.  On arrival at the orphanage to which he’s sent, the protagonist explains that he prefers to be called by the nickname Courgette.  Another kid, Simon, jokes ‘More like Potato, with that head’; in fact, Courgette’s bonce is more an egg couchant.  A remarkable thing about Barras’s award-winning film is how emotionally expressive the characters’ faces, dominated by their ping-pong-ball eyes, turn out to be.

The young hero’s real name is Icare, the high-flying/plummeting connotations of which echo in various ways.  Courgette got his nickname from his mother who, after her husband left her for another woman, became a hopeless alcoholic.  One day, as she comes after him in a drunken fury, her son accidentally pushes her downstairs.  She dies in the fall.   Courgette’s mementos of his parents include one of his mother’s empty beer cans and the homemade kite that he flies, on which the boy depicts his absent father as a superhero.  The real superhero in Courgette’s life turns out to be the kindly policeman Raymond, who takes a deposition from him in the aftermath of his mother’s death, continues to visit him in the orphanage and eventually becomes a foster parent to both Courgette and his soulmate-girlfriend Camille.  At the end of the film, Courgette replaces the image on his kite with a group photograph of the other kids in the orphanage.

One effect of the design is to make the children (eccentric) emblems of innocence and vulnerability even though their actual age is a significant element in the denouement.  Courgette and Simon become good friends.  The latter’s first reaction to the news that Courgette and Camille are going to live with Raymond is angry.  Simon recognises nevertheless that the pair must go with Raymond, pointing out to Courgette that kids as old as they are rarely get such an opportunity.  (Worth noting that the source material, the 2002 novel Autobiographie d’une Courgette by Gilles Paris, was previously adapted for the screen as a live-action French TV film in 2007, with the ambiguous title C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand.)  Plenty of what the kids do and say, however, makes it clear they’re far from infants.  The sharp, slangy dialogue by Céline Sciamma, the writer-director of Girlhood (2014), does an invaluable job of giving the film a more general pungency, which prevents Barras’s fable from drifting into delicate sentimentality.

The main voices are supplied by Gaspard Schlatter (Courgette), Sixtine Murat (Camille), Paulin Jaccound (Simon) and Michel Vuillermoz (Raymond).  Vuillermoz’s excellent line readings and the shape of Raymond’s head combine to make him perhaps the most substantially individual character in the story.  The appealing music is by Sophie Hunger.

6 June 2017