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French Canadian director Léa Pool gets the balance just right in her tenacious but elegiac "Set Me Free" (its French title is "Emporte-moi"). Set in Montreal in 1963, the picture tells the story of 13-year-old Hanna, who becomes entranced with Anna Karina's character, prostitute Nana, in Jean-Luc Godard's "Vivre Sa Vie" ("My Life to Live") and tentatively sets out to build her own adult life, suddenly having an idea of the kind of woman she wants to be.

Set Me Free Directed by Léa Pool Starring Karine Vanasse, Miki Manojlovic, Pascale Bussières

What makes "Set Me Free" so wonderful is that there's no preciousness, no condescension, attached to the fact that a 13-year-old might fixate on a fictional prostitute (especially one who dies tragically) as a role model. Hanna, played with an astonishing amount of delicacy and perception by Karine Vanasse, is of course attracted to Nana's glamour and beauty, but the magnetism of the character runs deeper than that. When Hanna, charming with her girlish freckles and pixie haircut, drags on her cigarette in direct imitation of Nana, it's like a small love letter not just to the resonance of certain movie images but to a certain kind of womanly sophistication, an angle of feminine mystery and beauty that Hanna's reaching toward without really knowing why.

The movie opens with a simple but indelible image: Hanna, visiting her grandparents at the shore, emerges from a swim, and as she makes her way across a few rocks, we see small drops of blood falling between her footsteps. The event isn't presented as traumatic, nor is it laden with "Today you are a woman" symbolism. But it does represent Hanna's first steps into a new world of possibilities. The complexities of adult love, and the thrill of it, are suddenly open to her.

Hanna's web of relationships is still fairly simple, in the way that childhood relationships often are, but you can see those connections getting more and more complicated with each scene. She adores her older brother, Paul (Alexandre Mérineau), and the two of them form a united front against their difficult, chronically unemployed father, played by the superb Miki Manojlovic, who, with his wild dark hair and liquid, tormented eyes, looks like a cross between Harpo Marx and Elliott Gould.

Hanna's father, a failed poet, is Jewish. Her fragile mother (Pascale Bussières, in a finely shaded performance) is Catholic. She's devoted to him, although his chronic anger and frustration wear her down so much emotionally that they also erode her health. Hanna adores her mother and feels incredibly protective of her. Her father's inability to show love and affection to his family doesn't seem to puzzle her much; she simply accepts it as his way. It becomes harder for her to deal with as she sees the toll it's taking on her mother, and as she inches closer to adulthood herself.

Next page | Adolescent exploration drawn with a delicate hand