Claire Doyon’s Pénélope My Love, a portrait of the director’s daughter, is one of the more striking films screening at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. Pénélope is a little girl who can’t bear to look others in the eye. She doesn’t sleep and has language difficulties, grinds her teeth and spins around ad nauseam, and bites and cries hysterically. Sometimes she throws her body to the ground and makes herself stop breathing until her face turns blue. In the meantime, the neighbor’s child learns how to play the guitar, reminding Pénèlope’s parents of the standards that their little girl is expected to live up to.
Over the course of the film, Doyon and her partner try several styles of therapeutic brutality to diagnose, re-diagnose, and attempt to cure Pénèlope—reflexology, osteopathy, faith healing, and behavioral re-education that aims to train Pénèlope like a dog or rewire her like a gadget. An American therapist refers to the child’s actions as attempts at “tracking” and “scanning” the world around her. At one point, the parents even take Pénèlope to a Mongolian shaman and try a diet heavy on carrot juice. But it’s all hopeless. And it doesn’t help that Doyon simply cannot manage to take care of her daughter without demanding normality from her in return. The obsession with recovery becomes, of course, more violent than the illness.
Pénélope My Love is a rare account of parenthood as a lost battle against an always imperfect child. Pénélope turns out to be severely autistic, or so she’s diagnosed, and one of the things that makes this essay film so poignant is that it exposes an open secret about parenthood in general: that the child we have always falls short of the idealized child that we wish we had, even when the child fits rather smoothly into normative expectations.
That’s the argument that Doyon makes through her masterfully sparse narration. As she reflects on the footage she shot of her daughter throughout a life of medicalization—whose violence seems only visible in retrospect—Doyon realizes that there’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with Pénèlope per se. The true horror lies in society’s naturalized paradigms, which cut off children’s propensity toward nonsensical play and irrational pleasures from the day that they’re born, or long before, and continue doing so forever after.
Though the therapies that Pénèlope goes through are a blur of similarly toxic pedagogies, psychoanalysis has a decidedly different stance on the child’s condition and cure. The psychoanalyst who Doyon sees refuses to diagnose Pénèlope for a whole year and suggests that it might be the mother herself who needs fixing if Pénèlope is to have any chance of being happy, if not healed. Doyon seems to give up on that form of therapy, too, because the analyst reveals Pénèlope as a symptom of an unaddressed problem that lies elsewhere and predicates the child’s cure on the parents’ cure. Doyon then finds solace behind the camera, eventually unaided by professionals and friends, documenting the child in tatters.
Pénélope My Love is disarmingly unconcerned with the celebration of maternal love or the supposedly inexorable innocence of children. Here, maternal love appears as the most conditional of all. The film works as the belated mourning of a mother who is finally allowed to say, literally, that she hates her child. And that, at times, she wished to kill her.
Death and childhood also haunt Malintzin 17, which consists of a series of unpretentious scenes where filmmaker and visual artist Eugenio Polgovsky and his five-year-old daughter, Mile, observe a pigeon nesting on a power line from their balcony in Mexico City. Malintzin 17 is an unusual kind of found-footage film. Eugenio’s sister, Mara Polgovsky, discovered the recordings after he died suddenly at age 40, and edited the sequences into a film.
One doesn’t need to know the tragic circumstances surrounding Malintzin 17 in order to be affected by its simplicity. The images of the pigeon and the unassuming street below are refreshingly artisanal. The filmmaker’s experimental gaze is accompanied by a camera that has actual weight, not the prosaic lightness of a cellphone. Eugenio is constantly worried about his daughter touching him while he’s filming and ruining the shot, even though his camera is geared toward abstraction, seeking to capture the vestiges of a completely uneventful day—the rain falling, a man delivering water gallons, a boy skateboarding—in the fuzziest of details.
Life passes by the father and daughter’s eyes, as though on a conveyor belt, beguiling them with its familiarity: a garbage truck, a gas truck, an ice cream truck, a tamales truck. At one point, the child wonders if the pigeon on the power line is fake. The father doesn’t answer, because he’s there mostly to listen, to encourage the daughter to remain puzzled by life—to make room for her to revel in the philosophical questions that animate young children. Is it a robot bird? Why would it choose to make its home on an electric cable instead of a branch?
Malintzin 17 is an exercise in looking, finding and discovering the dormant excitement of the laziest of afternoons. It’s also a film about parenting. The kind that sees daughter-father dynamics as a playful collaboration and the child as the holder of the greatest answers. And, most importantly, of the questions most worth asking.
International Film Festival Rotterdam runs from January 26—February 6.
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