La petite Chartreuse (2005)

thumb|Olivier Gourmet helping the script supervisor clean Vollard’s truck. Thérèse Blanchot moves to Grenoble with her daughter, Eva, whom she is raising alone. She is looking for a job and a sense of purpose in her life, feeling so lost that she neglects her daughter a little too much. One day, when Thérèse is once again late to pick her up from school, the little girl, desperate, decides to leave on her own, running through this unfamiliar city without knowing where to go. That is when Étienne Vollard, a solitary, troubled, formerly alcoholic secondhand bookseller with a phenomenal memory, accidentally runs her over. While she is in a coma, Vollard himself takes on the more or less forced role of adoptive father, telling her the stories his exceptional memory recalls perfectly, making up for Thérèse’s absence and helplessness in her relationship with her daughter. Eva eventually wakes up, but appears to be irreversibly condemned to silence, an apparent consequence of her trauma. Accepted into a rehabilitation center in the Chartreuse mountains, Eva learns to walk again but remains trapped by her inability to communicate, involuntarily becoming a little Carthusian, like the monks who have taken a vow of silence—consciously, in their case. Thérèse then finds a job in Lyon and does not dare admit—not even to herself—that since her daughter became disabled, she feels even less capable of taking on the responsibilities of motherhood. So she goes to find Étienne Vollard at his bookshop, “Le Verbe Être,” and asks him to visit Eva during her prolonged absences. Vollard eventually agrees, partly against his will, and little by little embarks on a desperate attempt to bring little Eva back out of the world of silence…