In 2012, French film-maker Claire Doyon made Pénélope, a 50-minute documentary, about taking her autistic daughter Pénélope to deepest Mongolia to meet a shaman. As a parent of children with autism, I made it a mission to watch as many films as I could about the condition, and this unfortunately appears to have slipped through the net and is not available anywhere, at least in the UK or US.
That elusiveness alone might suggest that Doyon’s own feelings about the film, her daughter and her quest to find ways to cope with Pénélope’s condition have changed over the years. What’s more, she has now made another film, Penelope My Love, which incorporates footage from her earlier work, forming what feels more like a revision than a mere revisiting.
Instead of covering just the one trip abroad, the scope here spans from the earliest hours of Pénélope’s life right up to the moment Claire explains to Pénélope that they’ve found somewhere other than home for Pénélope to live. This is not so much a bio-doc as an essay from Claire’s point of view about the rich but deeply challenging experience of being a parent to Pénélope, who is also diagnosed with Rett syndrome.
With admirable honesty and self-scrutiny, Claire reveals the different strategies and regimens she and her partner Nicolas Maureau, Pénélope’s father, have pursued hoping that they would help their child – from controversial Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), to a frankly quackish sounding treatment meant to stimulate the growth of myelin, the material that sheathes nerves. As any parent of an autistic kid will attest, it’s impossible to know if any of these interventions help given no one has an identical child with identical challenges to use as a control in the experiment. In the end, based on the person we see on screen, Pénélope grows up to be an appealing young woman: mostly non-verbal, athletic, able to form friendships with coevals, but still deeply affected by sleeping problems, breathing difficulties, meltdowns and more.
What really changes is Claire’s perspective, as she slowly comes to a sort of acceptance of Pénélope as she is, even if she’s aware that the hope for improvement is an unquenchable parental itch. Personally, I found it all profoundly relatable, in part, paradoxically, because Claire doesn’t try to universalise her and her family’s experience in any way, and she never stops questioning her own choices – not just about how to raise Pénélope but whether to film her, what to show, and what to edit out.
The very nature of the intense relationship between her and Pénélope, a bond that changes the shape of Claire’s life, comes under question by the very end. If anything, the film ends with jarring abruptness, but perhaps that’s just opening up a space for another feature someday about how Claire, Pénélope and the family will deal with the next phase of Pénélope’s life, living separately from her family.
• Penelope My Love is available from 17 November on True Story.
