Quand j'avais 5 ans je m'ai tué (1994)
Directed by Jean-Claude Sussfeld

Film Review

Howard Buten's celebrated novel When I Was Five I Killed Myself drew little attention when it was first published in the author's native America but later it became a massive bestseller in France.  One of the most insightful forays across the disturbed mental landscape of a young child, Buten's novel does not lend itself naturally to a cinematic adaptation but director Jean-Claude Sussfeld made a reasonable stab at it with Quand j'avais cinq ans je m'ai tué, the last of four films he made before he gave up cinema and devoted himself to working exclusively for French television.

Sussfeld's film is bound to come as a disappointment to anyone who has read Buten's idiosyncratic novel but it is nonetheless an engaging film that goes some way to expressing the confusion of an eight-year-old boy who has yet to come to grips with the strange and mostly arbitrary 'rules' that adult society chooses to inflict on itself.  It's revealing that the settings for the boy's past and present are so similar - the former a typical French infants' school, the latter a psychiatric hospital for mentally disturbed children.  As the narrative flitters back and forth between the two settings they become increasingly indistinguishable, two loveless institutions infused with the same indelible stench of antiseptic and urine that educate by fear and repression.  Little Gil's wild flights of fancy, some banal, others tending towards unbridled surrealism, are his only means of escape from the unthinking cruelty inflicted on him by the adults he cannot comprehend or communicate with.

There's some irony in the fact that the most terrifying adult Gil has to deal with is a psychiatric specialist (Patrick Bouchitey) who clearly has no understanding of child psychology and is only moderately less scary than Hannibal Lecter.  A more junior doctor (Hippolyte Girardot) succeeds in gaining Gil's trust by meeting him on his own ground, thereby providing the boy with a way out of his Kafkaesque impasse.  The characterisation of Bouchitey and Girardot's characters appears naive to an adult viewer, but we must recognise that this is how Gil sees them, the one an ogre to be resisted at all costs, the other a kindly guide who is there to help him make sense of the adult world.   Sussfeld's simplistic approach to cinema was far less successful on his previous films than it is here, effectively offering a child's eye view of the world, with its fleeting pleasures and barbed injustices.  Sussfeld catches the essence of Buten's novel without resorting to the kind of cinematic grandstanding that was becoming prevalent in France in the mid-1990s.   We can forgive the film its somewhat twee ending because it is such a tender homage to Albert Lamorisse's Crin blanc (1953), one of cinema's most intense evocations of childhood.

Film Synopsis

In the 1960s, Gil is eight years old, a boy who is forever locked in his own dreamworld.  A hyper-sensitive, hyper-imaginative child, he is already in love, with a little girl called Jessica.  Gil's unusual behaviour is so troubling that he is admitted to a specialist psychiatric clinic, where experts try to make sense of his condition and tame his excesses...