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The generational chasm between our parents’ lives and the memories we preserve of them — sure, in turn, to warp and fade when passed to our children — is elegantly explored in “Little Girl Blue,” Mona Achache’s pained, poignant docudrama cry to her female elders. In an effort to process her mother Carole’s death by suicide in 2016, the filmmaker collates an assortment of archival materials to trace the arc of a turbulent and care-starved life, leading inevitably to the time-blurred figure of Achache’s grandmother, writer and editor Monique Lange. But it’s in the gaps between tangible records that the film gets most interesting, as Marion Cotillard steps in to inhabit the Carole of her memories, the ones Achache can’t quite find on paper.

This is hardly a novel technique, given the evolving hybridization of the documentary form, as filmmakers chase larger audiences with the narrative and aesthetic comforts of fiction.

As tender, painful and intimate as an open caesarean scar, writer-director Mona Achache’s drama-documentary Little Girl Blue examines the fraught relationships between three generations of women within the director’s own family, starting with her literary grandmother Monique Lange, her mother Carole Achache and herself.

Although narrated by Achache, who “plays” herself throughout, the focus is above all on the troubled child of the midcentury Carole, who committed suicide in 2016 and left behind an enormous cache of letters, journals, publications, photographs and documents. Achieving a remarkable casting coup that will make all the difference for the film’s commercial prospects while richly enhancing its emotional texture, Achache persuades French superstar Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Inception) to play Carole. The result is a fascinating psychodrama — with extra scoops of meta on top — that showcases the talents of all the story’s women, especially Cotillard and Achache. At the same time,...

In one scene in Mona Achache’s “Little Girl Blue,” which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Special Screenings section, the director is seen insisting that lead actor Marion Cotillard stays in character even on her tea break, to the extent that she must drink tea noisily as her character, Carole – based on the French filmmaker’s own mother – used to do. Does this suggest a manipulative relationship between director and actor? Cotillard disagrees.

“I don’t see a director and an actor as being in relationships of manipulation. It’s more a collaboration,” she tells Variety. “It happened to me only once where I felt that I was being manipulated by a director, and I really didn’t like that.”

Although the male director, whom she does not name, had led her to believe that it would be “a process of working together with a collaborative connection,...