Hannah: Karine Vanasse	David Cohn: Miki Manojlovic
Hanna's mother: Pascale Bussieres	Paul: Alexandre Merineau
Laura: Charlotte Christeler	Director: Lea Pool

30 Second Bottom Line: A thirteen-year-old girl makes her transition to adulthood with a very unique and believable set of experiences that occur in a short amount of time. The timeframe for the story is the early 1960's.

Story Line: Hannah loves to swim and in the opening scene, stays under water for so long, you wonder if she is drowning. You later learn that suicide is on the mind of not only her, but both of her parents.

Her father, David Cohn, (Miki Manojlovic) is a holocaust survivor who sees himself as an artist that can't keep a regular job. He was married during the war and last saw his wife just before she went to a death camp. He's an unpublished writer who may never finish his first book. David has Hannah's mother (Pascale Bussieres) type for him at night after she comes home from her sweatshop seamstress job. They are always behind on bills with writing bad checks to the landlord and making frequent trips to the pawnbroker to make ends meet. David is a man who when he becomes frustrated, will slap his wife and kids.

Hannah's mother became pregnant with Paul (Alexandre Merineau) during a brief relationship after the war. The parents never married. She is Catholic and he is Jewish yet the reason for not marrying is more related to David not knowing for sure if his wife is alive. He does know in his heart that she is dead. Two years after Paul is born, the parents accidentally meet and David learns of the birth of his son. He decides to live with and take care of them and a few years later, Hannah is born. Up until that time, the mothers' parents had taken care of Paul at their house in the countryside and remain bitter that the child was removed from them to live with a man who they see as useless. When he loses a job, you can count on finding him at a chess hall until late in the evening.

Saying the parents are emotionally distant to Hannah is an understatement. The mother has told her nothing about expecting her menstrual cycle to begin and when it occurs, she is clueless about the meaning. It first happens while visiting her grandparents and her grandmother explains that there is really no purpose to it. It's just a useless function of the body that women must endure just as they have an appendix which serves no purpose.

When Hannah returns home from the visit with her grandparents, her father insists that she cut her hair. Just at the time she physically has become a woman, she is made to look more like a boy. She feels ugly to the point that when they are at the beach, she wears a hat to cover her butch haircut. Her mother is like a wallflower who when a home conflict arises, goes to her room and puts earplugs in. She tries to not hear, see or feel things that are not pleasant. She will stand up for her kids to David, but not for very long.

The mother says she loves her husband but it may be more a reflex of feeling she owes him something for trying to support her. If anything, it's a situation of loving someone you don't even like.

One day when Hannah is talking to her father in a rare heart to heart, he tells her about his wife during WWII and states that they promised each other they would never willingly take their own life.

Hannah brings some homemade fudge to her mother at work wanting to wait until her shift ends. When she is sent away by her mother, she is told the reason for not eating the candy is because "she knows what it tastes like". Feeling lost, Hannah wanders the streets and comes upon the Rialto movie theater where Jean-Luc Godard's My Life to Live (1962) is playing. She sneaks into the theater and becomes absorbed with the relationship of the young prostitute in the film.

Before long, she has seen the movie four times and begins to envision herself in the role of the prostitute. Although the profession is unseemly, the prostitute appears to be in control of her life and therefore "free". The film serves as a point of reference for major decisions by Hannah after separate traumatic events occur with both her mother and father.

Tell Me More About It: This is a Canadian film that feels as if it were made in France. It's set in Montreal with the actors speaking French. At one point in the film, I wondered how any teenager survives the right of passage from the stage of being a kid whose biggest worry is how late they can look at TV to being a responsible mature adult. The adults they come in contact with are major influences, yet the person with the most influence is the child….., him or herself.

Even though Hannah was a sheltered young lady, I have to believe that girls her age talk about the physical aspect of becoming a woman with a monthly menstrual cycle. Her being absolutely clueless on this at the start of the film made me wonder how serious I should take the picture.

What we become in life is influenced by who we meet. In this case, Hannah's teacher (Nancy Huston) is a mentor who manages to maintain a proper relationship to a student, and still convey caring and love for Hannah that her parents cannot. Although her first kiss was with Laura (Charlotte Christeler), a girl she met at a party, her first male kiss was with her brother while they were swimming underwater. Later at their house, the three of them play spin the bottle and further experiment with their sexuality.

Set Me Free is a film that is like a steady light rain. You know what is going on all the time, but it takes awhile for things to truly sink in. At first you don't get wet and here you tend to not fully understand the long term consequences of the events of what happen to people until well after they have occurred. More than anything else, while what others do shapes us, what we as in individual does has by far the most impact.