Miss Mouche (Bernard Halut, 2010): Belgium

Reviewed by Veronica Vanglin. Viewed at Lobero Theatre.

Miss Mouche felt very innovational and new thinking. It is the fourth work in the series of low-budget films produced by Cinéastes Associés. Director and writer Bernard Halut worked in television for over 20 year until he got the opportunity to work with Cinéastes Associés and make features. I must say that this is a pretty good debut. He really did the most with his small budget.

Twelve-year-old Nina (Mona Jabé) is like any girl in her age hanging out with best bestfriend, playing, outside of her beautiful country house and she also has a strong passion for flies. So strong that she even has her own blog where she only writes about flies. She tends to film everything with her cellphone. It is like her personal blog. After a while this all goes out of control when she is just filming everything, all the time. She starts following her parent and we get to see how they are cheating on each other, fighting about money and how the parent’s are in a very dark place of their lives at the time. When Nina’s filming results in her mom crashing her car and ending up in a coma Nina feels responsible for what happened. To refresh his wife’s memory, Nina’s dad uses her phone footage to help her recall what happened and who her family members are. Nina’s private life is being exposed and her father gets more information about both his wife and daughter, that he wish he would not know.

The film is very pretty and well done. It is filmed on a professional digital camera but Halut told the audience on the premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival that they added effects to make it look like it is filmed on a phone camera. The idea was to actually do so but they realized pretty quick that it would be to small and look terrible on a big screen. Miss Mouche is Mona Jabé’s first film and she is splendid in the role of Nina, a very lonely girl.

I’ve never seen a entire film shot like this before, except Quarantine which is a scary movie and the way of shooting is used to build suspense and to makes it harder for the audience to see what is going on. Miss Mouche is the other way around. Her filming tells us what is going on, she is a fly on the wall that no one notice but she can hear and see everything.

I really liked the way it was shot but it could have been a little bit shorter to keep the interest up. It is definitely a film worth watching because of the impressing story, acting and how much they managed to do with it despise the low budget.