Charly

Discovering sweet little gems is what makes film festivals so exciting to attend. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. Here, at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, there was one from France in Isild De Besco's "Charly." Nicolas is a listless, awkward 14-year-old whose life is a totally blank canvas. There's simply nothing there. After embarking on a journey to an island he's only seen on a postcard, he runs into Charly, a young woman who lives in a trailer, working at night and spending her days performing obsessive-compulsive homemaking rituals. The two forge a most unlikely friendship, although it takes quite some time for Nicolas to wake up from his stupor. When he finally smiles the audience breathes a sigh of relief -- yes, there is life after all.

Nicolas and Charly are not just at the heart of the film -- they are the film. It exists solely for the relationship between these two unlikely roommates and the ability of Kolia Litscher and Julie-Marie Parmentier to make them believable. One or both are on screen from start to finish and very few characters appear at any other time. So it is theirs to make or break, and their performances feel so real it's hard to imagine that "Charly" is scripted at all.

That said, although the film is titled "Charly," it would much more accurately be titled Nicolas, as it's ultimately the boy whose journey dominates the film from opening title to closing credits. Charly enters the film after the first act but, while she may brighten his life and give it a sense of purpose, it is Nicolas' coming-of-age which is truly the focus of the film and makes it so heartwarming. The film succeeds, more than anything, because Litscher's Nicolas is so innocent, vulnerable, and endearing. He is a joy to watch.

Cinematographer Jowan Le Besco uses available light almost exclusively along with organic sound. Hand-held camera dominates with numerous closeups. The result is a cinema verite look that turns the viewer into more of a voyeur than moviegoer. "Charly" has the feel of a Gus Vant Sant film with its young, attractive characters, long takes with little or no dialogue, and copious use of tracking shots. It also felt a bit like Bertolucci's The Dreamers without the explicit sex and nudity, although there is a fleeting bit of that as well.

While it takes quite some time for the story to gel, and although we never know where it's going, we don't really care because their relationship is just so odd and tender. There is so little action on screen but so much inside these characters which oozes out. Look up "sweet little film" in the dictionary and you just might see "Charly" as a definition.

Werner Erhard once said that if you want your life to work, begin by cleaning out your closet. In twenty five-year-old director Isild Le Besco's Charly, a loquacious streetwalker takes this advice and helps a fourteen-year-old runaway get his life together by pushing him to complete routine household tasks. Charly is a tender, totally honest, and completely believable look at two people who need each other but are unable to communicate. Shot in a format that does not even fill up a normal movie screen, let alone widescreen, the actors are mostly silent and the camera does not move very much, yet the film is never static or dull. Le Besco's younger brother Kolia Litscher is Nicholas, a sullen and listless fourteen year-old. Under achieving at school, the boy has trouble adjusting in the home of his grandparents (Jeanne Mauborgne and Kadour Belkhodja) and his teachers do not provide much encouragement.

One teacher tells him that he is very lazy and questions him about how he sees his future. To that, Nicholas tells him laconically, "I'm waiting for the future to come." When the teacher leaves a book of the controversial German 1891 play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind with a picture postcard of Belle-Île, a seaside resort, inserted, Nicholas has all he needs to pack his bags and head for his dream island. Charly (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a feisty twenty year-old prostitute finds him on the streets of a nearby city and asks him if he wants to come to her trailer home in the countryside. From there, Nicholas and Charly develop a most unusual relationship, one that is oddly supportive.

The equivalent of Cher slapping Nicholas Cage across the face in Moonstruck, telling him to "snap out of it", Charly assigns Nicholas routine tasks such as cleaning, washing dishes, getting water from the outside faucet, taking out the garbage, and shopping for bread, manifesting a need for assurance and structure. Nicholas, who has never before apparently had been asked to do anything for himself, is a willing pupil and Charly is grateful to have someone at home to do the chores she would rather not. Though there is no communication about thoughts or feelings (Nicholas never questions what Charly does at night or who picks her up each day on a motorcycle), their relationship develops an intimacy based on mutual need.

Parmentier's performance makes the film come alive, especially in the sequence when the two read aloud from Wedekind's play and act out crying and beating each other, perhaps the nearest thing to intimacy that each is capable of. In Le Besco's words, "I think that communication is not easy. To really communicate with someone you have to work hard to do something together. You have to be able to give a little of yourself. I think these two are able to give a little of themselves when they are reading this text of the play. But otherwise, they cannot really do it". Though Nicholas does a lot of growing up, Charly is no formulaic coming-of-age Indie and the film is not limited to a kitchen-sink reality. Several dreamlike sequences probe the inner workings of Nicholas' mind and allow us to see what cannot be verbally communicated. A tastefully done sexual initiation scene is also part of this totally unique gem that clamors for wider distribution.