Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
An impoverished boy falls in love with his neighbour, a poor girl mistreated by her stepmother. But rather than reaching out to her, he chooses a devious path to wealth in the grimly brilliant stop-motion animated short film The Girl Who Cried Pearls.
Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the film opens in a beautiful Parisian mansion, where a little girl discovers a pearl and hurriedly tries to hide it when her grandfather enters the room. But she’s in for storytime, and a rather bleak, twisted tale set in the snowy streets of Montreal.
“Of all the treasures in the entire room, you’ve guessed what’s most precious to me. It would seem someone has discovered my secret,” the old man tells his granddaughter. He then recounts the story of a young boy who discovers something extraordinary about the girl next door: her tears turn into beautiful, shimmering pearls. Instead of comforting her, the boy sees an opportunity to make a fortune, collecting her tears to sell them. But he soon encounters an even greedier, more cunning pawnbroker, who is all too happy to exploit the boy’s youthful naivety and humble circumstances.
At just seventeen minutes, ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls‘ boasts a distinctive visual style, with its hand-crafted stop-motion animation lending the characters and settings the texture of pastel paintings and old-world illustrations. The girl lives in a dilapidated wooden house, its dreary, crumbling interiors a stark contrast to the lavish bourgeois mansion framing the grandfather’s tale. There’s a storybook quality to the imagery, making the film feel like a forgotten fairy tale that’s been dusted off.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls saves a wickedly clever twist for its finale, transforming what initially appears to be a tragic little love story into something far more memorable, with some dark humor thrown in. It’s a grim fable about greed, opportunism and cunning, where even the most precious things can become commodities, and things aren’t what they seem on the surface.
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