In the context of our current cultural attitudes, it sounds creepy to talk about little girls and romance, but the truth is that little girls like romance. Not your standard, adult romance, with flowers and champagne. Romance for little girls is often dark, scary, snatched out of the teeth of death. Fairy tales are full of it: young girls being alternately wooed and terrorized by men they fear and/or long for. Take your pick: Beauty and the Beast, The Seven Swan Brothers, The Little Mermaid, who felt as though she walked upon knives, all for the love of a man. Pair them easily, not with the sugar-coated Disney versions, but with movies like Labyrinth, where a mysterious man offers dancing, jewels, glittering admiration, oh, but at a cost.
A pall of sexuality hangs over little girls, threatening and bizarre. You know that it does. Even if you want to look away, it’s there when you’re not looking. I don’t believe the threatening nature of sex ever dissipates; it’s just that as little girls grow up, we acclimate ourselves to its dark nature. We learn to avert our eyes and open our legs.
City of Lost Children
If you’re curious, I’ll add another movie to your roster of romantic films for little girls: The City of Lost Children. I’m sure many people won’t approve of me thinking this is a children’s movie, just as people were horrified by my suggestion that Pan’s Labyrinth would be suitable for a certain kind of child. The things is, I remember how dark childhood was, how unsatisfied I was with saccharine family movies, how false they were. I loved movies like Labyrinth, Legend, and The Dark Crystal, but often wished they were darker, more romantic.
The City of Lost Children, oddly enough, is the sort of movie I longed for at the age of ten. Directed by Marco Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (the twisted pair that brought you Delicatessen), it often gets described as having a convoluted plot, even an impenetrable plot. This is only true if you try to watch the movie in an adult frame of mind, if you grasp at all the random threads and try to tie them up into some macramé whole. Use your child mind and the plot is really quite simple.
Man loses his brother. Man meets girl. Girl helps him. Girl dies. Man is heartbroken, but wait! Girl isn’t dead. Reunion. Man and Girl fall in love, form a family, save his brother.
All the other stuff is stage dressing: mad scientist, clones, a brain in a fish tank, evil conjoined twins, child pickpockets, stolen dreams, Santa Claus nightmares. Fascinating, bizarre stage dressing, but not essential to the basic plot.
Miette and One
If “Man and Girl fall in love” disturbs you, ask yourself, “What are little girls looking for?” Especially little girls who are fatherless. The girl in the movie, Miette, is an orphan, but in this day and age, even girls who aren’t orphans are fatherless. It affects their lives in myriad ways, but most importantly in the way they choose the men they love. When she meets a circus strongman, named One, who is often simply referred to as “the big moron,” there is an immediate connection. He needs her help, but why does she offer it?
It’s as simple as desire. She desires him. She desires what he represents: strength, gentleness, a big man crying over a lost little boy. Who has cried over her? If he is a man-child, enormous but not terribly bright or sophisticated, she is certainly a girl-woman, old before her time and jaded.
Perfect Man
What makes it so romantic is that the movie doesn’t shy from it. It doesn’t place a paternal Hollywood distance between the two mismatched characters, but dares to show a physical intimacy between them that is both childlike and portentous of adult physicality. It dares to show a thing you’ll hardly see between two adults in a Hollywood film–a man giving a woman a foot massage. Hovering in the periphery are further suggestions: during a visit to a tattoo parlor (seeking a map), One gets a tattoo of a heart reading “Miette pour la vie.” Miette forever. The sort of tattoo a sailor gets for his sweetheart. As One rubs her feet, she asks what he plans to do after he finds his brother. A job, he answers. A house. A wife. What kind of wife? she asks. There is plenty of time, he assures her, to figure that out. Plenty of time for her to grow up into that wife.
Radiateur
Miette is a dark-haired girl in a red dress, and after her alleged death, One goes on a drinking binge with a dark-haired prostitute in a red dress–an adult Miette. When the real Miette arrives, she is alive but sour with jealousy. On the darker side, when One turns against Miette and tries to kill her (this is part of the elaborate plot, with fleas armed with a brutal potion that produces violence at the sound of an organ box grinder), the violence has the quality of a wedding night deflowering. One doesn’t want to hurt her, but he has to, is driven to it by a force he can’t control. Miette simply accepts it, as though she expects such a thing or deserves it. After one particularly visceral slap across the face, she gets up, crying, and waits to receive another. When he begins to choke her, she hardly resists.
Ultimately, of course, he will save her. She will save him. Together they will rescue the little brother and be a family. That’s what little girls want.
Happy Ending
(As an aside, let me note that one of my favorite actors, Ron Perlman, plays the strongman One. His French is serviceable, any deficiencies in pronunciation nicely hidden under a Russian accent. The little girl playing opposite him is Judith Vittet, 9 at the time of filming, and she’s charming, cynical, broken, and strong by turns.)
Bryn Greenwood 
I have never seen City of Lost Children, actually. But this post will now make me go and see with this in mind, perhaps this will make me a bit less hesitant to watch.
Bryn, this is a fascinating post. I’ve never seen the movie, but I’ll definitely have to now.
Re: sexuality and girls, I have to say (with great trepidation, and braced for a smack upside the head by someone somewhere, possibly my own mother) that Freud may have been way off base in a lot of ways, but I think he got the basic sexual imprint stuff right: little girls’ ideas of romance are entirely mixed up with father-figure stuff, and so the idea of protector/punisher/romantic partner is a pretty solid one. Hell, plenty of grown female friends of mine are still getting that one straightened out.
(I note, however, that in spite of some really heavy hinting and a great deal of glitter, there are fairly few successful works of fiction or film where the physical aspect of said man/girl romance is actually consummated.)
Ok, that’s all the Deep Thought I can muster before dinner. Thanks for posting this: it’s an interesting topic.
Oh, yes, I think children of both sexes take their parents as the template for their future sexual partners. It’s why I’m so grateful my biological father was largely absent during my formative years. He would have been a truly awful template.
As for the consummation of man/girl romance…I don’t think it is/ought to be. I think the point of that kind of romance is that the girl is safe from predation until she’s ready. The man has to be willing to wait. Otherwise it’s something else entirely. That’s what I love about that line in City of Lost Children: plenty of time.
And yes, please, everyone go out and rent this movie. It’s magical.
Oh, I was fascinated by that movie. I may have to see it again. The connection between the two characters wasn’t nearly as creepy as Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. But.. I think that was the whole point of that movie. Anyways…
Actually, I didn’t find the connection between the characters in Tideland creepy at all. He’s so clearly childlike, there’s never any real suggestion of sexuality between them. It’s a much more childlike romance than what’s going on in City of Lost Children or Labyrinth.
Loved all the movies you named and actually just recently saw City of Lost Children. I love your analysis of it!
The topic is quite trendy on the Internet at the moment. What do you pay the most attention to while choosing what to write about?
I do notice I get a lot of hits on this particular post, but then I love this movie, so it doesn’t surprise me that other people are looking for more info about it. As for choosing what to write about, it’s always a question of what random thing pops into my head. Sometimes it’s things I read, other times it’s simply an urge to work a thought out, as this post is.
Well I just rewatched this movie. When I was younger I enjoyed it for it’s artistic quality more than it’s plot as I understood the basics of the plot the undertones were a little more than my brain wanted to handle as I understood what I was watching but didn’t want to think too much about it. I as like 11 when I first saw it. As I watched it again I enjoyed much more than it’s visual quality and basic story plot. I accepted what I saw and nodded yep. I still see it. I remember the first thing that popped in my mind. Man this movie is Pedo bait. In which I really hope no pedophiles ever see it. It’s a dark fairy tale which I enjoyed and applaud the director for taking those risks. All the actors were awesome, loved Ron Pearlman in it. It was a refreshing to see children who were acted more like calculating adults and adults who where more childish than the children. I guess One and Miette even each other out, which was the attraction between the two.