L'Enfant Secret

A filmmaker and a woman meet, are together, separate, and meet again. She has a child, and he tries to build something between himself and the boy. Philippe Garrel wrote it out of his own life and, rather than narrating events, films only the moments that remain: a room, a bed, a hospital corridor, a street. Black and white images and long silences are the language. Addiction and psychiatric treatment sit in the background and neither is explained. It is treated as the threshold where Garrel moved from his seventies experiments toward narrative; there is still almost no dialogue, but there is now a story. It won the Jean Vigo prize in France. Who it is for: viewers who like French art cinema and autobiographical narrative. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident and explanation, since the film leaves only moments.