My Life As A Zucchini
Céline Sciamma is better at *gestures broadly* all of this than everyone else.
It feels weird to write about Céline Sciamma and not focusing on Portrait of a Lady on Fire. There’s an argument to be made that Portrait was the best film of 2019, yes, even over Parasite. It had one of the most exhilarating endings of the decade, at least. It is personally my second-favorite film ever while being the best-made film I have ever seen. It is the film I most want to do a newsletter on, but I am worried it is so good that I won’t do it any justice. It is flawless and a masterpiece in every sense of the word. And after this paragraph, we are not going to talk about it again today. For as outstanding as Portrait of a Lady on Fire was, It is a sharp departure from the rest of Sciamma’s career. Somehow Sciamma’s work in her other movies might actually be more impressive.
Sciamma has co-writing credits on two other films, but for the purpose of our discussion, we are going to look at the first three features she directed, Water Lilies, Tomboy, and Girlhood, with a specific focus on her co-writing work on My Life as a Zucchini.
Before we get too far into this, I don’t want to make the same mistake I made in the Frances Ha newsletter where I barely mentioned Noah Baumbach. Claude Barras directed My Life As A Zucchini. He deserves credit for this film just as much as Sciamma does. Barras wrote his first draft based on the book before letting Sciamma do what she wanted with the screenplay. I am going to focus on Sciamma because her work means so much to me, and she is my favorite director, but I don’t want what Barras did to get lost in the shuffle.
There are many things to point to, but if I had to boil why Sciamma is my favorite director to one specific thing, it is the care she puts into her characters. There’s a line in Lady Bird, speaking of one of my top two directors, about how love and attention are the same thing. It would have been very easy to treat My Life as a Zucchini like any other kid’s movie. Sure, the source material is a bit dark, and we get the death of Zucchini’s mother in the first few minutes, but how is that different from something like The Lion King or Bambi?
In less capable hands, this would have felt like your typical kid’s movie, but Sciamma does something that very few filmmakers take the time to do; she actually respects both the child characters and the child audience that will watch the film. Sciamma even said as much in an interview about the film, “The goal of the film was to take children very seriously as characters, in the writing, and to take children very seriously as an audience, believing in their intelligence.”
We see this respect for children in Sciamma’s earlier works as well. Her debut film, Water Lilies, is one of the better-written movies I have seen about teenage sexuality and coming-of-age. She understands how complicated a time it is and takes the necessary care to tell the story. Not a feature, but Pauline is one of the best, most simple shorts I have ever seen that feels so real and tender. One of the better twist endings too.
Tomboy has one of the best portrayals of the relationship between two young siblings. It is a remarkable film, and on its own would prove that Sciamma is one of the best filmmakers working right now. Again, the level of care she took with each character is astounding. There’s literally only one other director I can think of that cares as much about telling real stories about children in the way that Sciamma does, and that is Hayao Miyasaki.
Far too often, kid’s movies are treated as a lesser art form. I am sure part of it is being out of that target audience, but from the outside, it feels like way too many characters in kid’s movies are written without any depth. Even in ones made for kids with the occasional joke for adults, it feels like the film doesn’t care about making something that respects children’s intelligence and emotional depth. I mean, we still get this in films made for adults, my biggest complaint about Candyman was how Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele treated the audience like they needed their hand held and everything spelled out for them. This is just way more common in films aimed at younger audiences.
One specific moment stands out in My Life as a Zucchini where I knew this was not going to be your traditional kid’s movie. Zucchini and Simon are gathered in the courtyard after their bonding moment. Simon is going through why each kid is at the orphanage. All of them are obviously quite heavy because they kind of have to be, from deportation to trouble with the law. Then Simon gets to Alice’s situation. She was brought there because her father abused her. She has PTSD and taps her utensils on the table because of it. Even if a movie had that in there, they probably would have found a way to make fun of the utensil movement. Instead, Sciamma treats it as an ordinary thing that Alice is going through. She recognizes the humanity in each character that she writes. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but I imagine it would be powerful to watch this as a kid going through the same things that Alice is going through and see it as a regular thing.
The thing that stands out about My Life as a Zucchini is just how magical the film feels, while the world around it is so depressingly bleak. It still captures that realism that all of her films capture so effortlessly, but it is still able to seem optimistic without it feeling fake at all. I kept thinking that it had no right to be so hopeful with the world around it. Making optimistic films is far from the first thing I think of when I think of Sciamma, especially compared to someone like Greta Gerwig, but all of her films undeniable have that same throughline, even if the ending is torturous like in the one we aren’t talking about anymore.
My Life as a Zucchini is all about finding small moments of happiness where you can. It would be very easy to make this movie about kids in an orphanage as depressing as it would seem on the surface, but Sciamma and Barras instead look at the joys of a community. Being able to make great art that fully acknowledges the difficult circumstances of the time while also transcending that should be appreciated more. In My Life as a Zucchini, we get that particularly with the bond between Zucchini and Raymond, the police officer. Their friendship is heartwarming and funny, but Sciamma doesn’t gloss over the fact that he is still a cop and the kids rightfully are not the biggest fans of cops because of their history with them.
The film soars once Camille joins the orphanage. Her friendship with Zucchini is fascinating. It has so much more depth than any other two child characters I have seen in a long time. The film does not shy away from Camille’s history of losing her parents and how difficult that has been. She holds the group together and helps each of them individually become better people. The scenes between her and Alice are some of the best I have seen in any Sciamma film. The sequence where the group conjures up a plan to save her from going to her aunts is tremendous. We see how much the group struggles when her aunt initially takes her, so it was great to see how they handled her and Zucchini leaving to go live with Raymond.
I know I have said it countless times over the last two years, but I genuinely don’t believe there’s a single filmmaker more talented than Céline Sciamma right now. She so effortlessly captures the humanity of her characters while being visually breathtaking. There is something magical about her films that is enough for her to be my favorite director. I am hopeful that after Portrait of a Lady on Fire, more and more American audiences will discover the rest f her work and see how she is just operating on another level.
There are four movies worth of examples of how Sciamma is writing laps around most other filmmakers right now when it comes to portraying children in a meaningful way and taking the time to care about them. We are about to get out 5th example later this year when Petite Maman hits theaters. It tells the story of two children in the woods dealing with grief. I am trying to go in as blind as possible, so I don’t want to dive into it much more than that. Sciamma said Miyasaki was a significant influence for her for this film. It has debuted to rave reviews at a few festivals already and premiers at the New York Film Festival in two weeks. My guess is it hits US theaters around late November or early December, but we could see it in early 2022. There’s no chance that Sciamma will be able to surpass the masterpiece that was Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but exposing a newfound audience to her roots is a pretty good outcome too.
Sorry about the delay and lack of communication with the newsletter release this week. Going forward, I will plan to release it every Friday. Since we are here, I’ll make up for it by giving my upcoming schedule a bit. Next week is about Raw in anticipation of Julia Ducournau’s upcoming film Titane, which drops on the same day as the newsletter. The rest of October is Jennifer’s Body, Ready or Not, and special newsletters on Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright with The French Dispatch and Last Night in SoHo dropping on the same days as the newsletters. Thank you again for reading.