The title “My Little Princess” means not only the incredibly beautiful girl, Violetta, but also the little girl whom lives deep in Hanah’s heart. This film depicts a mother-daughter relationship as well as a woman-girl one. A little girl, lovely and glamorous, needs mother’s love but encountered sexual exploitation by her mother. A woman, a photographer, also needs an existential sense but earn her fame by exploiting her daughter. Instead of an entanglement between a mother and a daughter, the film might be around the theme that they were just assigned to their characters, a mother and a daughter. So they, according to their characters in the mom-daughter relation, endlessly demand the unobtainable love and understanding from each other, with the issue of woman: sexiness.
A child who sell her/his sexiness still makes people live on tenterhooks in 21st century, let alone the passing 70s. Nevertheless, such uneasiness might be resulted from the sway, between the naive of a child and the sexiness of an adult, caused by bad imitation. When Violetta displayed her gifted understanding of sexiness, child’s nude seems an escape from the cage of age and become an art. But the ordinary couldn’t understand it, her classmates and teachers, the judge and social worker, as well as the lecherous artists and riches. All of they make an art as porn while only Hanah understand Violetta’s transcending-times talent.
However, what Violetta cares is more about her mother’s attention. She can’t distinguish initially whether the game is about love or exploitation. Until the photographing journey to Britain, a series of dispute, argue, and controversies with anger were burst out. Violetta yelled at Hanah what you did is incest; you rape me by your camera. It discloses the hidden theme of this film, the past about why her mother is so heterodoxy.
This film's focus is more on Hanah, who tried to find out her existential meaning. The screaming out to her mother (actually her grand mother), her carelessness of her family, and inexorable exploitation of her daughter, have good explanations from her past eventually. Hanah’s mother was raped by her father (Hanah’s grandpa) and bore Hanah. In the beginning of this film, Hanah entered the room and murmured to Mamie why the portrait of Violetta’s truly grandma (Hanah’s mom) was hung on the wall. For Hanah, she had great doubt about her existence and thus her grandma’s conservative personality pushes her to be heterodoxy, which was totally different from her family. She tried to find out her own existential meaning: art, which could accept and help her twist and abnormality to be settled down.
Ironically, the fame which eventually Hanah has earned in art circle came from the sexual exploitation, the incest that she had tried hard to escape. When Vilotta argued with her and claimed the photography was incest, she was astounded a bit and immediately retorted it to laymen’s opinion. She was trying to change the meaning of her birth, on one hand, and also was resisting the scaring repeat of incest which might erode her new existential meaning, on the other hand.
Near the end, Mamie’s death terminated all argues while it also brought another crisis. Mamie is a symbol of Hanah’s abnormal past. Therefore her death dispersed the necessity of Hanah’s escaping from her family. But government then regarded Hanah as sexual exploitation and thought of divesting Hanah’s fostering right. As a result, the photographing game of naked child was ended, in which Hanah seeks her existential meaning as well as Violetta seeks her mother’s love. Violetta recognized that the love she tried to seek from her mom doesn’t exist at all while Hanah started to face her past, accepted the psychotherapies. In the end, Violetta came back to home and accidentally heard Hanah’s story from the recorder. She finally understood (might forgive) her mother a little. The hateful but also desirable father (grandfather) creates the little princess. The princess was the girl Hanah herself in her eyes (her photography) while each Violetta’s sexy photo is the reflection of Hanah’s self.
