airy tales routinely kill or banish parents to clear a path for the roaming imaginations of children. Recall that Hansel and Gretel must plumb the forest alone, assaying their own mettle, and the stranded Goose Girl cannot speak her secret self to another soul. Céline Sciamma, who said in an interview with Tricia Tuttle that she “wanted to get rid of the adults” in her stories, renders similarly untended youth stumbling into life. Throughout her work, the French writer-director rigs up respites from the confines just outside, boundless sweeps where her characters can play at being otherwise, only to then scupper them—a guardian, a man, money, marriage, the clock inevitably intervenes—and so show their ache, transience, and beauty. That these temporal films which magnify the small hopes sprouting between restriction and responsibility are called “coming-of-age” makes sense because, somehow or other, youth
