Blame it on Fidel (2006): B+

Director(s): Julie Gavras. Screenplay: Julie Gavras and Arnaud Cathrine. Cast: Nina Kervel-Bey, Julie Depardieu, Stefano Accorsi, Benjamin Feuillet, Martine Chevallier, Olivier Perrier and Marie Kremer. Distributor: Koch Lorber Films. Runtime: 99 min. Rating: NR.

No other film at this year's annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema managed to beautifully capture an evocation of history as much as Julie Gavras's (daughter of the legendary auter Costa Gavras) sensational film, Blame It on Fidel. Whereas overrated trash like Avenue Montaigne robbed the festival's inner core, this is the one film that truly stood out, not only for its daring ambition but its wonderful ideologies and insights; more than that, though, there's one factor that truly elates this wonderful film: its true simplicity. Gavras evokes Paris, 1970; the truly brilliant Nina Kervel plays Anna, a girl who savors living in her bourgeois ambiance; but it's when her parents, Marie (Julie Depardieu) and Fernando (Stefano Accorsi), take a trip to Chile—where Socialist politician Salvador Allende is in the process of campaigning to become the country's next president—that her life shatters: they return to Anna and her younger brother, Francois (Benjamin Feuillet), as new people, devoted to the struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere. Through Anna's naïveté, Gavras is able to bring a simple, yet extremely acute vision: the gaze of a child seeing the world, for the first time, clearly. As Anna's missing of the bourgeois life continues to the point of her about to run away, her parents only get more involved; yet just as her fathers political shattering subsides, she comes to her own. It's here when Anna respects the fact that choice is what life is made of, and she subsequently realizes that she can live in such a way. Despite a wee bit of structure problems in the beginning, Gavras's film develops to a fantastic accomplishment, whimsically and charmingly seeing Anna's and Francois's angst through wit, hilarity and grace; the script eschews such assurance that it magnificently buoys off of the characters. Funny it also is: throughout the film, she's constantly being nagged by Francois's naive questions. Narratively, such subjects fit perfectally; and though an exquisite score, graceful camera-work and lighting—a heartbreaking scene in which the news of Allende's death is magnificently aesthetized through a light-to-no-light backdrop—Gavras brings forth a superlative film; one that many will be able to connect to as well as simply feel.