Emotion, Girlhood, and Music in Naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma, 2007) and Un amour de jeunesse (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)

Abstract

Céline Sciamma’s Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies (2007) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Un amour de jeunesse/Goodbye First Love (2011), both made by young female directors, offer us insights into the heightened sensations and emotions of adolescent girlhood. Concentrating on a female protagonist who is aged around 15 at the start of the story, both films recount the bruising and painful experience of first love and its loss, and are part of a whole flurry of recent French films, from the art house to the popular, that consider girlhood and coming-of-age.1 Both films make stunning and remarkable use of music on their soundtracks, and music is as much a vector of meaning and affect as mise-en-scène or dialogue. Rather than being “unheard melodies,” to borrow Claudia Gorbman’s now canonical phrase,2 the music used by Sciamma and Hansen-Løve works to give form and expression to girls’ emotions, but through a depersonalized register. The music is outside of the girls’ worlds, usually non-diegetic, and is not the literal expression of their voice. Rather, it is a disembodied, non-identical expression of their feelings, and thus a paradox can be maintained, whereby the films simultaneously offer us insight into the heightened, disoriented sensations of the girls’ encounters with intimacy, but allow the girls to retain their opacity and privacy.