Precarious lives: On girls in Mia Hansen-Løve and others

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the cinematic representation of girls' lives in transition, in the move from childhood to adolescence, and in the negotiation of a relation to their environment and their kinship network. Referring to Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself, it looks at the ways in which moving image representations can offer an approach to the girl subject as always in part opaque to herself, as always shifting, precarious, unfixed and unknowable. This is found at its most acute and full-blown in the first two feature films of Mia Hansen-Løve, Tout est pardoné (2007) and Le Père de mes enfants (2009). Hansen-Løve reflects differences between sisters and the differences between a single girl at different ages. More broadly, French women's representations of girls are revealing the ways in which subject formation is always precarious and shifting, that the subject is at once vulnerable and opaque.