Louise Hémon’s first feature film, L’Engloutie (literally meaning “The Engulfed One” but due to be released in the Anglophone world with the title The Girl in the Snow), is inspired by her great-great aunt, Aimée Bigalet, who wrote of her experience as a teacher in an isolated mountain village between the French departments of Isère and Hautes Alpes in the 1920s.
Set on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the film focuses on a young teacher, also called Aimée (played by Galatea Bellugi), who arrives by night in a snowbound hamlet in the Hautes Alpes. In her new role, she tries to “civilize” the few children there through her teaching and to overcome the hostility of the older villagers, but finds herself confounded in her efforts to educate and communicate by the ancient folklore of the area and the mixture of Occitan dialect and French spoken by the locals.
Somehow erotically charged both by the freedom of being away from home and the superstitions of the region, she has sex (separately) with two of the younger men in the village, Pépin (played by Samuel Kircher, who starred in Catherine Breillat’s 2023 film L’Été Dernier) and Enoch (Matthieu Lucci). Immediately afterward, each man disappears mysteriously, which might be entirely coincidental, linked to the place’s ancient folklore or directly related to the schoolmistress’s arrival. The film provides no answer.
Hémon manages to achieve an effect of magical realism within the harsh snowy landscape and the dark interiors, lit only by candles or chimney fires. Apart from the named protagonists, most of the supporting cast members are non-professionals from the region, adding to the film’s feeling of authenticity. It was particularly interesting to hear the local dialect spoken. In one of the most striking scenes, the villagers play music on their wonderfully strange instruments.
Bellugi is engaging in the central role, even if the depiction of her character is occasionally baffling. On her first night in the village, for example, she somewhat improbably opens her copy of Descartes’s treatise L’Homme (obviously brought to impose rational teaching upon the school pupils) and starts pleasuring herself to an illustration of a man in the book. Has the sensuality of ancient folklore already taken hold of her before she has even had a chance to meet the villagers, or does she see her arrival in this new place as her first chance to have a good time?
I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot, but the ending also left me confused, as it seemed to contradict what had been portrayed just before.
If perhaps rather too many gaps are left for the viewer to work out, L’Engloutie is still an atmospheric and intriguing movie that augurs well for the future work of Louise Hémon.
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