Neglected Masterpiece

The film begins with kid's close-up: a boy's smiling and pulling faces for the main hero. In 5 minutes his father will die. The picture is set in France, 1918, in the world without men. All men either perished or lost on the fields of WWI battles. Only oldmen, women and kids survived.

Giorgio (Jeff Dahlgren) returns from the battle-front poisoned with german gas and suffocated with asthma. The only thing in the world is important for him: ten kids in the orphan's home where he worked before the war. But children are evacuated in a far mountain village. And he's going there with big package of fruit-drops. There is a forgotten sweet taste of quiet childhood in this package. These fruit-drops are the only bright point in the movie among snow desert and dim light of interiors. Giorgio's going to find lost peace of the old world but gets into a fearful tale without happy end.

In the village they say: "Children perished long ago. Catherine drowned them in a bog." Catherine (Mylene Farmer) says that children drowned saving themselves from the wolves but nobody believes her: wolves don't live there...

There are not much such amazing, convincing and magic worlds among landscapes of world cinema as the world created by Boutonnat in Giorgino. It's a film about childhood(not sunny and happy), about the lost childhood of the world. Childish face of the hero bears imprint of confusion of the things that happens with this world: innocence is lost, illusions are broken, childhood is passing away. It's not only about Giorgio - it's about the whole world. 

To retell the plot is senseless: the story is in the telling. Dramatically and visually perfect, emotionally powerful, this movie affects me so much! Its transcendental insight reminds me Roeg's Don't Look Now. Giorgino is much more perfect. Maybe it's the greatest movie ever made because it allows us to come close to the edge of the world, to the bound between us and mysterious...
10/10