The best of all these “Coming of Age”- films resist in romanticizing the adolescence of young people. They often deal with what Zoé Pelchat said about her Gaby Les Collines, when she “wanted to express the disconnect puberty creates between head and body.”
In cinema we can see for the time being only the surface, the landscape, things and bodies. What happens in the head can be at the most perceptible in the kind the visible things are context of the each other created arrangements and the montage which finally will allow them to represent themselves in the sense of André Bazin. Than the visible surface of the visible things are getting more depth. Gaby´s growing breasts are at first a superficial fact, not more and not less like an evolutionary event. The body language and facial expressions of Gaby suggest confusion, discomfort or even rebellion against the dispossession of her body by ideology and social categorization. It seems like she defies being put into a stereotypical gender pattern.
She spends the holiday with her divorced father and his girlfriend on a picturesque island in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. Actually, she is a passionate football player and a good goal keeper. For now the environment suggest nothing else than a place where body and soul can recover
The film has two opposite currents. The one is the pleasant surface of a landscape during holiday holiday, summerly and breezy. The other current is rather subversive and it is represented in two remarkable moments. The girlfriend of her father gives her a dress which underlines her flourishing female curves. She might have done it in good intentions but there remains a sign of discomfort in the girl´s face. Her body becomes a certain image preformed by a certain stereotypical gender stereotype begins to take possession of her body. While her father and his girlfriend feel obviously comfortable with their sexual identity, Gaby is still confused.
Later, Gaby attends a beach party with some other young people. The seizure of a natural developing body by ideology and social categorizing becomes more aggressive. With some of them she has played football in her childhood not too long ago. One of them sings a obscene mock song about Gaby´s changing body. It is already a verbal assault. The surface of this picturesque landscape during holiday becomes deceptive. Gaby and the film itself that her (Gaby´s) image about herself against engulfment by others and the film has to defend the freedom, literally the “art of seeing its images against all predetermined social patterns.
Gaby Les Collins is a wonderful crystal clear variation of the “Coming of Age”-genre (the Berlinale dedicated it a whole retrospective) and it answers as well the question why this genre is present in the film history for ages and in numberless variations.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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