Innocence

This film is set in a utopian-seeming setting as a school for girls, that serves as both a sanctuary and a prison. We open in the film following Iris, a girl who arrives at the school in a coffin, being born into the system in which the young girls for the most part govern themselves, sort of a reverse- Lord-of-the-Flies scenario. The girls are separated both into age-groups, signified by the color of ribbon worn in their hair, and into different houses, we follow House number three, where we are introduced to Alice and Bianca, two other girls whose stories we get to see. 

Within this film the camera changes perspectives with the narrator, of which there are more than five transitions, as the audience tries to piece together the mystery that is held with in the boarding school the camera allows us in to each narrator's unique perspective of the school, as sanctuary, salvation, a comfortable home, a prison, an obstacle to the outside world, or part of the journey of life, the leg that precedes adulthood. 

 While the plot is tres lent, the cinematography keeps one's eye's glued to the screen as the natural landscape shots interweave with action shots of young faces and stories telling  of the feeling of longing, secrets, and all in all the anti-climax of growing up. Something seems to be brooding inside the movie, as one watches young girls live together in what surmises must be a dance school obsessed with the idea of the life-cycle, birth and death, caterpillar to butterfly. yet the death  and disappearance of two of the young girls seems more of a foreboding never realized than tragedies within themselves. The need for secrecy is also never realized as the climax of the film simply reveals what can only be referred to as a recital, nothing so dark as what an audience member would expect. 

In this way the film is frustrating and gives the audience member little satisfaction in finding out the mystery of the setting. Yet the film gives great reward to the aesthetic viewer.