Le Pupille TV review — Disney stocking-filler set in an oppressive religious orphanage

There’s a new straight-to-streaming Christmas film on its way to Disney Plus. It’s set in a boarding school and features impish kids and severe schoolmistresses. You already know how this one goes. Or so you think.

Le Pupille is neither your typical Yuletide yarn nor your average Disney original. For a start, it premiered (unseasonably) earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival. Behind the camera — a good old 16mm one at that — is the Italian art-house director Alice Rohrwacher. Supporting her as producer is Mexican multiple-Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón. Complementing these filmic credentials are some no less impressive literary ones: as a prefatory note reveals, the 40-minute short is “clumsily and freely based on a letter” written by the Italian author Elsa Morante.

This curious fable about a group of girls at an austere religious orphanage in the 1940s is indeed loosely structured, but the execution is anything but clumsy. Between the artful credits, playfully mannered tone and regard for fine details, it occasionally brings to mind the work of Wes Anderson. There’s a touch of Céline Sciamma too in its faith in the wisdom and decency of children.

Yet while Rohrwacher builds a luscious atmosphere, the actual plot is rather lean. It’s a snowy Christmas Eve, but there’s not much festive cheer among the girls. Their dormitory is freezing — hell is hot, they’re reminded — and their mouths have been washed with soap for committing the grave sin of singing along with the radio. When the children are manipulated into forgoing cake that has been donated, one hitherto God-fearing girl engages in a small but significant act of sedition.

Naturally there’s a bigger story being told here about how dogma can be used as a tool of oppression and the dangers of overbearing moralising, but these themes would have been better served in a less narratively slight piece. Still, if Le Pupille is not exactly a substantial gift, it makes for a charming little stocking-filler nonetheless.

★★★☆☆

On Disney Plus from December 16