My Life as a Courgette [Ma vie de Courgette] [My Life as a Zucchini] *** (2016) – Movie Review

A nine-year-old boy nicknamed Courgette (voice of Gaspard Schlatter) accidentally kills his mother (his father is in prison) and is befriended by kindly policeman Raymond (Michel Vuillermoz), who takes him to a foster home, where he learns the meaning of trust and love.

Director Claude Barras’s simple, short and sweet 2016 comedy drama animated feature was Switzerland’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Oscars. It is a unique one-off, both in its visual style and story-telling, and is very appealing in both departments, and all over in 65 minutes. Despite its good humour and positive messages, it is somehow vaguely sad and morose, and weirdly unsettling and disturbing. Courgette has an odd flavour, apparently.

Though it could leave kids and the cynical cold, it is probably the kind of film that some adults would take warmly to their hearts.

It is renamed My Life as a Zucchini for America, where they use the Italian not French name for the Courgette vegetable thingy, a summer squash usually harvested immature at 15 cm to 25 cm but can reach a meter long, called a marrow in the UK. Like the film, they are rather tasty.

Céline Sciamma adapts the novel by Gilles Paris. It might have been even better as a live-action movie. Maybe someone will try to do it sometime.

There are both dubbed and subtitled versions in the UK.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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