Growing up with revolutionary parents

"Blame It on Fidel" is told entirely from Anna's point of view (often the camera pulls in tight enough to crop the adults' heads out of the frame). She sees everything and wants explained what she doesn't understand, like communism. When she asks what communists want, her mother's mother (Martine Chevallier), a dignified but not outrageously fancy woman, doesn't miss a beat: "Everything."

Another, more infuriated explanation comes from one of Anna's nannies (Marie-Noelle Bordeaux). An exiled Cuban who had to flee when Castro took power, she says the communists are bearded nomads who don't believe in God. When Anna asks an actual communist, she's answered with one of the metaphors in the movie that challenge her Catholic upbringing: an orange, whose sections, he says, the communists want to share with everyone.

You can see Anna taking all this in and considering it, in the same way she appears to have absorbed the birds and bees (she knows all about them). Kervel has an amazing face for that sort of processing. The stillness that comes over it is not blankness but thought. She and Gavras (the daughter of the leftist filmmaker Costa-Gavras) create an emotionally translucent soul. This is a girl who keeps her feelings private but by no means is she withdrawn. The toll her parents' ideas takes on her is evident, but the movie doesn't call on her to dramatize unhappiness. When something bugs her she'll let you know, whether you're her father or the rigid nun teaching her at an all-girls school.