TIFF 09: MY QUEEN KARO Review

Ah, the seventies. Flower power was in full bloom, the age of free love and counter culture protest having taken firm grip all throughout the western world. It's a topic that has become well familiar to viewers by now, material that we've seen covered many times before, but Belgian writer / director Dorothée Van Den Berghe breathes new life into the era by presenting it to us from a different perspective. It is not the revolutionaries that she is concerned with, not with the flower children themselves, but with one a generation removed. Her subject is Karo, a young girl of around ten, swept up into the free love lifestyle when her parents pack up and leave their Belgian home to settle an artists' squat in Amsterdam.

Raven and Dalia seem every inch the perfect hippy couple - socially aware artists very much in love both with each other and their young daughter. And while you can argue the politics of squatting there's no doubting that their goals are good as the pair - with a small band of like minded friends - break into a largely abandoned and neglected building to set up their utopia of freedom and sharing. And everything is good - really good - at first, the only small hints that something may go wrong coming in the form of Karo asking why she can't have her own room and generally feeling lost in her completely anarchic - and almost entirely Dutch speaking - free school. But children adapt quickly, yes? And so Karo will be fine, no need to worry.

But what of the adults? There is ultimately nothing more selfish than an ideologue, particularly an ideologue in charge, and it isn't long before it becomes clear that Raven views his concept of freedom and sharing as the only acceptable one, never mind whether the others want to share the same things that he does. Particularly not if what he wants to 'share' is himself. With Alice. A concept Dalia is none too fond of but has zero power to change. And with the entire group living in one single, common space, with no doors or walls, Karo has no choice but to witness her father's sexual activities with this new woman and the subsequent slow breakdown of her parents' relationship.

With material such as this the temptation must have been enormous for Van Den Berghe to veer off into digressions on the politics and social changes of the era but this is an urge she resolutely resists, larger scale issues appearing on screen only if and when they impact directly on Karo's life. Rather than engaging in cultural tourism, she focuses purely on her unusual coming of age tale, the end result being that we learn that free love doesn't really make anything easier at all.

Impeccably crafted, My Queen Karo is a film that will ultimately succeed or fail for each individual viewer depending on how they feel about young Anna Franziska Jaeger, the actress charged with playing the title role. For my part, I never quite connected with her and found the entire film somewhat muted and distant as a result but - in fairness - I seem to have been the only one in my screening who responded that way. But even I concede that Van Den Berghe has an uncommonly keen eye when it comes to recognizing the key moments that shape us in our young lives and a gift for recognizing that it is the quiet moments that make the biggest differences.