I thought I might try to pen an Oulipian essay on Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig, in which a girl (despite nearing double digits) has neither milk nor adult teeth. Why Mia (Romaine Hemelaers) is toothless is never revealed; this is simply the state she is in. I thought I might try to write like Mia would talk: toothlessly. This would be my creative constraint, a complement to the confined worlds of Hadžihalilović’s films. Unsurprisingly, writing without alveolar, interdental and labiodental consonants and sounds is troublesome. Language is all gummy, all labial. With no d or s or t or z, no th and no f or v, verbal supply is severely limited. I kept coming up short. Luckily for you, reader, Mia is given new teeth – although the first few sets, dentures made of ice, offer her only a temporary solution.
Earwig is the French director’s third feature and her debut in the English language – a fact that is almost irrelevant for the first 20 minutes of the film, in which nobody speaks. Hadžihalilović’s associative, symbolist cinema works more with images than with exposition through dialogue anyway, and you don’t need teeth or words to dream. While Earwig opens with an ear in close-up, this is a call to listen out for more than just language – to Warren Ellis’ eldritch use of the ondes Martenot on the score, for instance, or for the sounds of smashing glass.
Mia’s difficulty with words is matched by the few words of her keeper, Albert Scellinc (Paul Hilton), a man unable to escape his past. Albert and Mia reside in a large house where he keeps the windows shuttered at all times. Their glass seems to torment Albert, allowing light to be shed on a dismal present. In another form, glass fascinates and haunts him: he keeps a cabinet of fine glassware in the house, taking pieces out from time to time to marvel at them. This is one of few pleasures Albert allows himself, alongside a long drag on a cigarette after dinner. Yet when these glasses catch what scant light there is in the tenebrous interiors of the house, the refractions dazzle and transport him, again, back to his past.
Distracted by these vitreous visions, Albert is less interested in Mia, whom he keeps out of obligation to “the master”, a voice on the other end of the telephone who calls 20 minutes into the film to tell Albert to prepare “the girl” for the outside. Albert dutifully dresses Mia in a red coat, socks and shoes, and the two walk around the park. In Innocence (2004) and Evolution (2015), Hadžihalilović was primarily interested in how children are prepared for the next stage of life. In Earwig, she focuses as much on adulthood as on childhood. Forty minutes into the film, Albert has an encounter with an enigmatic stranger at a pub and accidentally scars the face of a barmaid called Celeste (Romola Garai) with a smashed glass bottle; the film then focuses as much on the repercussions of this tragedy as it does on Mia.
Mia is nonetheless an intriguing addition to Hadžihalilović’s cinema of children. Only Mia and Mimi in ‘La bouche de Jean-Pierre’ (1996) must interact with adult men (more or less indifferent to Mia, Albert is decidedly less lecherous than Jean-Pierre). Only Mimi is anything like as lonely as Mia. In Innocence, Evolution, and one short with the Latin title ‘De Natura’ (2018), children come in groups or in twos. Together they pass through ‘an antechamber’ – “a collective child imaginary”[1] – into the sexual and symbolic world of adulthood: a boarding school in the woods in Innocence and a subterranean hospital by the sea in Evolution.[2] Mia, however, has the misfortune of passing through the dingy abode of Albert, less her antechamber than a prison cell in which he is immobilised by memory and mourning. While groups of girls in Innocence twirled about white ribbon wands in the woods, Mia makes herself odd, pitiful toys out of newspapers, dragging them along the floor behind her listlessly.
Under the watch of women who are guardians but not mothers, the girls in the lakes of Innocence flower into little women (a process accompanied in the film by the motif of caterpillars becoming butterflies) and, in the marine waters of Evolution, embryos take shape in the tummies of small boys (echoed, of course, by the image of a seahorse). All of this flowing freezes in Earwig. “Flowing and freezing: glace in French means glass, mirror, and ice; transparency, opacity, and water,” writes the art theorist Rosalind Krauss. Of glace, Krauss goes on to say that “in the associative system of symbolist thought this liquidity points in two directions. First, towards the flow of birth – the amniotic fluid, the ‘source’ – but then, towards the freezing into stasis or death.”[3] In all of Hadžihalilović’s features, birth and death swirl together (think back to the child-size coffin in Innocence). But the watery, creaturely becomings of Innocence and Evolution take us towards the flow of birth, and Earwig points more towards that “freezing into stasis or death”. Materially, glace in Earwig appears less as the water through which we move and live and grow than as glass and ice.
Albert regularly fits Mia with a kind of bridle with two bulb-shaped ampoules at either end of a bit made of glass. Spit collects in the glass ampoules; each is then poured by Albert into a pair of dental moulds, which go into a freezer. He later fits Mia with the result: teeth made of ice made of spit. Drooling and freezing, then: this is the unhygienic state of glace Mia is in. Adults in Innocence and Evolution exist to prepare children – to borrow words used by a guardian in Innocence and also by one in Evolution – “for the next cycle”. As Mia’s ice teeth melt, however, her saliva mixes with old saliva: the current cycle, never mind the next, is continually infected by the previous one. With dribble down her chin and around her collar, she spoons mustard-coloured mush with the consistency of baby food into her mouth – a sad, sludgy image of arrested development.
First there is the flow of birth, then there is freezing into stasis. Innocence and Evolution each close with an image of futurity: the excitement of sexual maturity to come, the adventure of a new horizon. Rather than a dead end, the films close with a bubbling fountain and the passage of the sea. In Earwig, though, Mia’s ice and Albert’s glass take us towards stasis. Mia is left eventually with something like adventure, or the new, but Albert and Celeste are frozen into repetition. Celeste finds Albert and with a smashed glass bottle slashes a cheek for a cheek. What follows is an astonishing image of cannibalism. Earwig ends with teeth: with a bite that is also a kiss, tethering the lacerated couple together, traumatically ever after. There is no hint of a next cycle between Albert and Celeste. There is just the same cycle again, and again, and again.
Laura Staab is a writer and researcher based in London.
[1] Emma Wilson, ‘Miniature Lives, Intrusion and Innocence: Women Filming Children’, French Cultural Studies 18/2: 172.
[2] Jonathan Romney, ‘School for Scandal’, Sight & Sound 15/10 (October 2005): 35.
[3] Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October 9 (Summer 1979): 59.