THE FILM
TITLE: Pachyderme
RELEASE DATE: 13 Jun 2022
WATCH DATE: 21 Feb 2024
TYPE: animated short film (French)
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THE PEOPLE
DIRECTOR: Stéphanie Clément
PRODUCER: Marc Rius, Mathieu Rey, Thomas Giusiano
ACTORS: Christa Théret
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THE STORY
RUNTIME: 11min
STORYLINE: a woman reflects on the abuse and trauma she experienced as a young girl while on holiday at her grandparents’ house
STYLE/GENRE: childhood, trauma, abuse, memories, family relationships
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THE CRITIQUE
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This short film's script brilliantly captures what childhood memories feel like. Short sentences. Sometimes just phrases. The animation brings it to life. Colors. Light. Sound. It's a soft and welcoming style... but you can tell something about the story is uncomfortably wrong.
Pachyderm. A very large mammal with thick skin, especially an elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus. An elephant. An elephant never forgets. And Louise has never forgotten. Although, as we see, her memories are... incomplete. We know something bad is happening, and we can only guess. Pacyderme captured the way a child's mind processes trauma - pulling details from surroundings to make sense of it, or to avoid it entirely, only remembering moments but not the whole picture. There is a huge tusk of a ‘pachyderme’ - likely an elephant - that stands in the hallway of her grandparents’ house. It symbolizes her grandfather, and all the pain and trauma he causes her.
I was perplexed after watching it and did some research to better understand the film. I learned that the film is about Louise’s trauma with incest from her grandfather (or rather, rape) and the traumatic psychological experiences that came along with it. This can be guessed at in the film with certain queues... the way grandfather towers over the little girl; how his hands and arms swallow her dainty appearance; red light sneaking under her closed door at night. We only have one look at his face in the firelight: a furrowed brow, possibly angry, but definitely not a happy man. There’s something broken about him.
Throughout the film, Louise is animated as helpless, weak, unable to fight against or change her situation. It is happening to her. However, there is also something to be said of a pachyderm’s "thick skin". Though this film presents a little girl's experience of incest, rape, and trauma, I think the film missed a huge opportunity to capitalize on the concept of thick skin. Terrible, wrong, wicked things happen to us... but we can rise above and stand strong despite those trials. The ending shows the girl, now a grown young woman, standing at the lake, wishing to drown the now-broken tusk that represents her childhood pain, “but the lake could never be deep enough.”
There is a lake deep enough, to drown every pain, every trauma, absorb every tear. That lake is God’s grace and the blood of Jesus that heals every wound. He will take the brokenness, the pain, the trauma, the tears, and he will give you something whole, and renewed.
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THE RECEPTION
NOMINATIONS
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THE IMPRESSION
IN A SINGLE WORD:
MOST STRIKING ELEMENT: trauma/abuse
REWATCH: no
RATING: 3 // 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐
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