“Ava”, the debut feature film by La Femis film school graduate Léa Mysius, incorporates a poignant twist into the familiar tradition of French films about adolescent sexual awakening. At only 13, its titular protagonist (Noée Abita) is diagnosed with early-onset retinitis pigmentosa. She will soon suffer from a limited field of vision in conditions of low light. Her field of vision will progressively narrow, and it will not be long until she is fully blind.
With the help of cinematographer and co-screenwriter Paul Guilhaume, Mysius’ used 35mm stock to saturate the film’s color palette. The effect is to signal the preciousness of vision, of the value Ava places on the last few weeks where she can see the beach, the sunset, the skin textures of her mother and younger sister, and the visage of Juan, the teenage Spanish gypsy that she embarks on her first sexual and romantic experience with: “His face is incredible. Not seeing it would have killed me. I want to see him again. I want to save him and be saved.”
In her review of the film for feminist film journal Another Gaze, Imogen West-Knights noted that Mysius avoided the cinematic cliche of endowing a blind female character with an excess of vulnerability. There is an inevitable sense of pathos to Ava’s desperate pursuit of sensuality as her vision deteriorates, but she is also selfish, impulsive and reckless to a nearly absurd degree. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, she stoically practices walking blindfolded to prepare for the next chapter of her life. She steals Juan’s dog for this purpose and eventually saves him from the cops.
The duality between life’s harshness and heady pleasures is well-represented in the film’s score, which begins with a more harsh and aggressive sonic tapestry that eventually gives way to a more hedonic and harmonious sound. During the headiest points of Ava’s tragic-romantic summer, Mali world music duo Amadou & Mariam’s “Sabali” signal her long-awaited moment of jouissance: ‘Avec toi, chérie la vie est belle/ La la la la la la’ (‘With you, baby, life is beautiful’).
Mysius has no experience in blindness herself, and based the film on the experience of being forced to work in darkness due to her debilitating migraines. Like Ava, however, Amadou Bagayoko lost his sight as a teenager (at 16, while Mariam Doumbia lost hers at 5). The use of “Sabali” in this film is thus doubly resonant. The song’s unmistakably uplifting burst of synths and Mariam’s infectious joy point to Ava’s embrace of sensuality in all its forms (touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell), and to the greater wealth of auditory sensations that she will likely experience once she loses access to the visual realm altogether.
