Werner Erhard once said that if you want your life to work, begin by cleaning out your closet. In twenty five-year-old director Isild Le Besco's Charly, a loquacious streetwalker takes this advice and helps a fourteen-year-old runaway get his life together by pushing him to complete routine household tasks. Charly is a tender, totally honest, and completely believable look at two people who need each other but are unable to communicate. Shot in a format that does not even fill up a normal movie screen, let alone widescreen, the actors are mostly silent and the camera does not move very much, yet the film is never static or dull. Le Besco's younger brother Kolia Litscher is Nicholas, a sullen and listless fourteen year-old. Under achieving at school, the boy has trouble adjusting in the home of his grandparents (Jeanne Mauborgne and Kadour Belkhodja) and his teachers do not provide much encouragement.
One teacher tells him that he is very lazy and questions him about how he sees his future. To that, Nicholas tells him laconically, "I'm waiting for the future to come." When the teacher leaves a book of the controversial German 1891 play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind with a picture postcard of Belle-Île, a seaside resort, inserted, Nicholas has all he needs to pack his bags and head for his dream island. Charly (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a feisty twenty year-old prostitute finds him on the streets of a nearby city and asks him if he wants to come to her trailer home in the countryside. From there, Nicholas and Charly develop a most unusual relationship, one that is oddly supportive.
The equivalent of Cher slapping Nicholas Cage across the face in Moonstruck, telling him to "snap out of it", Charly assigns Nicholas routine tasks such as cleaning, washing dishes, getting water from the outside faucet, taking out the garbage, and shopping for bread, manifesting a need for assurance and structure. Nicholas, who has never before apparently had been asked to do anything for himself, is a willing pupil and Charly is grateful to have someone at home to do the chores she would rather not. Though there is no communication about thoughts or feelings (Nicholas never questions what Charly does at night or who picks her up each day on a motorcycle), their relationship develops an intimacy based on mutual need.
Parmentier's performance makes the film come alive, especially in the sequence when the two read aloud from Wedekind's play and act out crying and beating each other, perhaps the nearest thing to intimacy that each is capable of. In Le Besco's words, "I think that communication is not easy. To really communicate with someone you have to work hard to do something together. You have to be able to give a little of yourself. I think these two are able to give a little of themselves when they are reading this text of the play. But otherwise, they cannot really do it". Though Nicholas does a lot of growing up, Charly is no formulaic coming-of-age Indie and the film is not limited to a kitchen-sink reality. Several dreamlike sequences probe the inner workings of Nicholas' mind and allow us to see what cannot be verbally communicated. A tastefully done sexual initiation scene is also part of this totally unique gem that clamors for wider distribution.
