Through the Eyes of a Child: Alfonso Cuarón, “A Little Princess,” and the Sacredness of Youth
It’s almost too obvious to even say, but here goes: the best children’s movies are those made by filmmakers who have never lost touch with their inner child. They are not reverse-engineered from merchandising tie-ins. They are not created to capitalize on the latest commercial trends and gimmicks. They are not based on the box-office calculations of studio number crunchers. No, the best children’s movies — the ones we’re still talking about years later — are invariably the work of sensitive and perceptive collaborators who haven’t forgotten what it’s like to observe the world through the eyes of a child. They are lovingly and respectfully crafted for their young audience, without pandering or condescending to them.
We too often romanticize our childhoods as a period of time before responsibility, a time when we were allowed — even encouraged — to be carefree. To dream. We celebrate our own naïveté as we bask in the warmth of nostalgia. But that’s a rather insulting oversimplification. Childhood isn’t all sugary breakfast cereals, coloring books, and Saturday morning cartoons. It wasn’t in the 1980s, when I grew up, and it isn’t now. We too often forget that childhood can be a scary time. It can be lonely. It can be sad. It can be disappointing and confusing. As adults, it’s easy to look back and dismiss the anxieties of childhood as trivial annoyances, but such an attitude ignores the fact that, at the time, these feelings were hardly inconsequential. From our limited perspectives, they were all that mattered.
Alfonso Cuarón understood this when he signed on to direct A Little Princess for Warner Bros. in 1994. At first glance, the filmmaker would appear to be an unlikely candidate to adapt Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel for a major Hollywood studio. He’d only directed one other feature film, a low-budget Spanish-language sex farce made in Mexico City four years earlier, and it had never even been theatrically released in the United States. But that film, Sólo con tu pareja, did manage to find its way in front of Sydney Pollack, whose production company was looking to fill directing slots on Fallen Angels, a new anthology noir series to be aired on Showtime. Pollack was impressed by Cuarón’s debut and hired him to direct an episode of the show entitled “Murder, Obliquely,” based on a Cornell Woolrich story and starring Laura Dern, Alan Rickman, and Diane Lane. Cuarón won a CableACE Award for his work, beating out much more recognizable names like Steven Soderbergh and David Lynch for the prize, and further establishing himself as a filmmaker to watch.
One week later, Variety officially announced Cuarón’s involvement in the upcoming Burnett adaptation.
While it’s easy to draw a line connecting one project to the next, the fact remains that, on the surface, neither of Cuarón’s previous efforts immediately suggest the cinematic temperament or delicate wonders on full display in A Little Princess. As demonstrable a showcase of his talents as Sólo con tu pareja and “Murder, Obliquely” are, they are decidedly not G-rated affairs. One concerns a womanizer who is tricked into believing he has AIDS. The other is the down-and-dirty stuff of classic noir: adultery, jealousy, and a crime of passion. Cuarón’s decision to work under Warner’s recently-christened Family Entertainment banner came as a surprise to executives, but the filmmaker had a very specific audience member in mind. “When I went to meet with the studio,” he told the New York Times in 1995, “they asked me if I wanted to do a dark piece. And I said, ‘No, I want to do a movie for my 10-year-old son.’”
Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuarón’s longtime friend and cinematographer, had been making Hollywood inroads of his own at the time, thanks largely to his work in Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate, a surprise international hit in 1993. In fact, it was Lubezki who gave Cuarón the latest draft of Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay for A Little Princess to read one afternoon, and the director was captivated almost immediately. “I was twenty pages into the script and I called my agent and said I found a film I want to do,” Cuarón told Peter M. Nichols, author of The New York Times Essential Library: Children’s Movies. “The pages were vibrating in my hands.” Making a film for his son, Jonás, might have been first and foremost in his thoughts, but those vibrations, as Cuarón has explained, stemmed not just from the father-child relationship at the heart of Burnett’s novel, but also from the mystical tone that LaGravenese had introduced into the narrative. Years later, in 2007, while being honored as part of the British Academy of Film and Television’s “BAFTA Goes to Mexico” celebration, Cuarón called A Little Princess his most personal work, likening the young protagonist’s journey in the film to his own “spiritual awakening” around the same time. He only hinted at this awakening at the time of the film’s release, speaking somewhat cryptically to the New York Times. “Life is showing me things that I’ve not seen before, that I’ve been skeptical of before,” he told David Kronke. Cuarón then added, “I don’t believe in coincidences anymore. They’re hidden messages that are given to you.”
If it sounds like Cuarón is talking about something akin to magic, he is. In the press notes for the film, he admits as much. “I think the movie is about the power of magic, and for me it’s very important because I’ve been learning that there is not such a difference between magic and reality.” Cuarón was in his early thirties while he was making A Little Princess, but his comments then and now echo the way certain Christian denominations describe an idealized faith as being one that is childlike in its acceptance. I don’t mean to infer anything about Cuarón’s religious or spiritual inclinations here, but part of what makes A Little Princess one of a handful of films — made explicitly for children or otherwise — that truly deserves to be called “magical” is the deep, sincere, and, yes, childlike openmindedness and openheartedness with which he approached the material. It’s a remarkable achievement of translation. Those vibrating script pages resonated every bit as much once they became moving images.
There are moments in the film so quiet in their beauty and tenderness that you nearly hold your breath for fear you might intrude. Watch as the widowed Captain Crewe (Liam Cunningham), shortly before he heads off to war, bids farewell to Sara (Liesel Matthews), his only child. The screenplay indicates that they are to speak to each other “almost like lovers.” There’s nothing remotely erotic about their interaction — LaGravenese was writing about an intensity of feeling — and Cuarón’s direction strikes the correct emotional timbre. Each new camera setup brings us ever closer to father and daughter, until we’re inches from their faces. It’s a key scene, and it’s not difficult to imagine how maudlin it could have been in less assured hands. That lines of dialogue like, “Magic has to be believed,” are elevated beyond mere platitudes and carry genuine dramatic weight is a testament to both Cuarón’s sensitive handling and Cunningham’s and Matthews’ performances. Their voices barely rise above a whisper, and you hang on their every word. As Sara, Matthews has a luminous screen presence. It’s a demanding role — she’s in almost every scene of the 97-minute movie — and it’s one that requires complete emotional range. In rare moments, her portrayal suffers from the same over-enunciated theatricality of many child actors, but there isn’t a scene where she’s not fully reactive, alert, and engaged. Cunningham has far less screen time, but he gives a soulful, anchoring performance. It’s easy to believe in magic when the surrounding emotions have this much conviction. As the scene unfolds, we become more and more like privileged eavesdroppers, witnesses to a private, vulnerable moment, never intended for outside eyes or ears. There’s an almost hypnotic quality to this level of intimacy, heightened by editor Steven Weisberg’s judicious use of dissolves rather than hard cuts.
Every Cuarón film, in its own way, is about the sacredness of youth, yet he’s never shown much of an interest in romanticizing childhood or adolescent rites of passage. A Little Princess is a gorgeous film — Lubezki received his first Oscar nomination for his work — but it certainly doesn’t view Sara’s circumstances through rose-colored glasses. Only the confused Great Expectations, in its dopey obsession with first loves and heartbreaks, comes close to that kind of treatment. (Describing his first kiss, our tortured artist-hero reminisces, “You remember. You remember how it felt. And then I went home to draw it.”) Cuarón is much more concerned with emotional perspective, and he recognizes how determinative those early memories can be as formative reference points. A Little Princess has a highly-developed emotional intelligence, far greater than what would be expected in most children’s movies. In the above scene, for example, Sara likely doesn’t realize in that moment what kind of lasting impression saying goodbye to her father will leave on her life, but Cuarón imbues their farewell with the ineffable power of a sense-memory, one more intensely felt than remembered.
These are the very kinds of sense-memories that have a way of rising to the surface in Cuarón’s films. I can only imagine how the omniscient and dispassionate narrator of Y tu mamá también might interrupt the scene to recontextualize this exact moment in Sara’s journey. In that film, he relates the bitter sting of betrayal felt by Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) to earlier childhood traumas:
“Julio couldn’t understand what he was feeling. He knew it wasn’t rage. The only other time he’d felt this pain in his gut was when he was eight, when he woke up thirsty one night and, on his way to the kitchen, saw his mother in the living room in his godfather’s arms. Julio had walked away quietly and never mentioned the incident to anyone.”
“Tenoch had only felt this pain in his gut when he was 11, when he saw his father’s picture in an article linking him to a scandal involving the sale of contaminated corn to the poor. Tenoch and his family moved to Vancouver for eight months. He never asked why.”
Or perhaps the memory would prove to be a positive force in Sara’s life — complicated, but ultimately happy — like the one Harry Potter summons to activate his protective Patronus Charm in Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:
“I was thinking of him. And Mum. Seeing their faces. They were talking to me. Just talking. That’s the memory I chose. I don’t even know if it’s real. But it’s the best I have.”
In form and content, A Little Princess, Y tu mamá también, and Prisoner of Azkaban couldn’t be more different, yet all three are crystalline expressions of what it means to be young, made by a director who admits to pinning his hopes for mankind on the next generation. “I really like to communicate with younger people,” Cuarón said from the British Academy stage during “BAFTA Goes to Mexico” in 2007. “I have a big faith and a big belief in the next generation. I’m not very hopeful about our present. If anything, I’m pessimistic about the present. But I’m very hopeful about the future.” It’s also no coincidence that the ages of the main characters in both A Little Princess and Y tu mamá también roughly correspond with his son’s while he was developing and making those films. You don’t have to squint too hard to see these movies as personalized tributes to their relationship. There’s a reason these two titles in particular are his most deeply felt artistic statements.
One of Cuarón’s greatest strengths as a visual storyteller is the attention he pays to point of view, whether it’s objective, as in Y tu mamá también, or subjective, as in A Little Princess. The latter is told almost entirely through Sara’s eyes. “Maybe in real life Miss Minchin just had a little strand of white hair,” Cuarón explained to the New York Times in 1995, “but we give her a big streak of white hair, because that’s the way a child would see her.” Certain other design concepts, like Bo Welch’s marvelous sets, were also exaggerated to make Sara and the other girls appear even smaller in the frame. Doorknobs were placed higher, staircases were made wider, all to make Sara the filter through which we experience the story. But the emotional resonance comes from Cuarón’s ability to simultaneously dial into certain events as someone who has already survived them while also experiencing them anew through the eyes of his son, Jonás.
Filmmaking demands stamina and endurance, and it’s not uncommon to hear directors being praised for their youthful vitality. This is particularly true when they’ve just made a film about young people. “He reminds me of a kid,” Michael Gambon told the Los Angeles Times in 2004, after working with Cuarón on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. “His enthusiasm, his mannerisms, his energy.” The actor was echoing sentiments made to the Times by producer David Heyman two years earlier, when Cuarón was announced as the franchise’s next director: “He has a great sense of magic, boundless imagination, a real compassion for children and a keen understanding of teenage life and its nuances.” I would hope those qualities were prerequisites for any filmmaker about to tackle a children’s film, but they seem to be more of a way of life for Cuarón. His brother and frequent collaborator, Carlos, once described him as a teenager at heart to the Los Angeles Times, and points to the director’s close relationship with Jonás as being his fountain of youth. Indeed, as Jonás came of age, Cuarón stopped making films for his son and started making films with him. He and Jonás co-wrote Gravity together and Cuarón recently produced Jonás’ feature directorial effort, Desierto.
A year after A Little Princess was released, Richard LaGravenese was asked by Movieline if he had trouble getting inside the head of a young girl while writing the film. He answered, “What’s so hard about imagining loneliness or the loss of a parent or being afraid?” It’s a terrifically pithy and appropriate response. Children are people, too, after all. But it doesn’t fully explain the emotional dynamic that Cuarón so beautifully brought to the material. Yes, Sara is alone and frightened throughout much of the film, but what of Captain Crewe? He knows firsthand how cruel and unfair the world can be, having lost a wife and another daughter during childbirth, and Cuarón hones in on that sense of parental uncertainty and worry — the same feelings that haunt Theo Faron (Clive Owen) in Children of Men and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) in Gravity — just as vividly. Captain Crewe’s own helplessness mirrors his daughter’s. For the scenes in which Captain Crewe has amnesia, Cuarón told the Los Angeles Times that he directed Cunningham to behave as if he were a lost kid. Adversity has a way of bringing out the existential child in all of us, and it’s the maturity of that perspective that allows the movie to speak to more than just grade schoolers. If Cuarón looks back and regards Y tu mamá también as a grown-up film about adolescence, I wonder if he thinks of A Little Princess as a grown-up film about childhood.
