Coming of age collides with forgetting La Gradivathe story of French high school students who visit the ruins of Pompeii. This Cannes Critics’ Week selection (and Grand Prix winner) marks the directorial debut of director/co-writer Marine Atlan, who crafts a hugely moving story about volatile young people – played by incredible non-professionals – and their thorniest self-discoveries.
The film is a naturalistic home movie, but Atlan also displays enormous formal control. The sun streams gently through the windows of a train compartment in an early scene, as young James (Mitya Capellier-Audat) has sex with Angela (Hadia Fofana), a girl in his class. This hormonally charged introduction is one of the few moments La Gradiva He gives his characters such close intimacy. It’s not long before she pulls back to reveal the young lovers being watched by curious onlooker Tony (Coulas Coignard), their ostensibly strange colleague, who ends up with James, but whose dynamic with him becomes more curious and complicated during their academic pilgrimage. Atlan’s camera, for the most part, reflects Tony’s feelings of alienation by embodying a surveillance and surveillance style of capturing emotional teenage abandonment.
The Italian summer sun obscures and exposes in equal measure, creating thick fog at dawn and dusk, while illuminating youthful intellectual discussions during the day. The same sunlight also illuminates old family photographs that Tony clings to, of his enigmatic grandmother in her youth, when she lived in Naples – snapshots in time, not unlike long-preserved Pompeii. For Tony, a young man cut off from his lineage, this journey also provides an opportunity to learn more about his lost history, and the details of his family’s tall tales that he often gets wrong.
The film’s sprawling ensemble is completed by her reclusive classmate Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a reserved, bookish girl who accumulates strong opinions before exploding, and the children’s uptight teacher Madame Mercier (Antonia Borisi, the group’s only veteran actress). It’s not often that teen movies meaningfully contrast the possibilities of youth with the dispiriting of middle age, but Mercier, as the teens’ pessimistic caretaker, finds herself (for the most part) in a position to contemplate her life’s path while her students await the results of their college applications.
|
La Gradiva ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
On the brink of adulthood, the film’s young heroes face the prospect of death for the first time, as they slowly learn about the volcanic material (or “Gradiva”) and sudden eruptions that enveloped Vesuvius’ ancient victims. This sense of a life once lived, but suddenly cut short, forms a haunting mirror to the teens’ own lives, as Angela confronts the reality of James’ exploitation of her, Susan finds strange refuge in Tony (a strange fellow), and their respective emotional outbursts begin to mirror their volcanic eruptions—particularly in the way Atlan traces the merging of volatile emotional elements. These are teenagers in love, who hate and adore their peers in equal measure (as much as they hate and adore themselves), and whose notions of the world, art, politics, and history repeatedly clash.
What is or is not, what may or may not constitute a historical crime or a modern social faux pas, feels constantly in flux, threatening to turn even the most mundane interactions into unpredictable skirmishes. Thus, Tony is walking on eggshells. This mood particularly extends to his dynamic with Mercier, whom he believes has abandoned his academic prospects. However, the conscientious teacher is completely attuned to his sprawling inner life—a world in which we, the audience, have a front-row seat. So when she holds the pages of his hastily written personal assignment with her fingertips, as if disgusted by them, the effect on his psyche seems enormous.
Like the cast of long-dead Pompeianians, Tony is a young man encased in plaster, usually of his own making. However, even the film’s most expressive teens encounter a similar distance. Atlan and co-cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer use long, voyeuristic lenses to make even the audience feel like they’re staring in from the outside, which has the double-edged effect of making each viewer feel like an outcast in a clique, while also creating, around the camera subjects, a self-imposed invisible shield.
Tony being eccentric certainly plays a role in this emotional dynamic. but La Gradiva It also deals with a more modern form of queerness, one that is socially matter-of-fact, but no less powerful in how the characters relate to each other, and to themselves. For example, the question of James’s sexuality is a mystery that the film doesn’t feel the need to address, other than the fact that he may be manipulating Tony and Angela’s feelings, intentionally or otherwise. From the perspective of any nostalgic adult viewer: he’s just a stupid teenager. However, the sense of immediacy and occasion created by Atlan’s camera (and Guillaume Lillot’s flowing conversational editing) imbues every word and action with enormous significance.
This, for better or worse, is the most important journey in these young characters’ lives so far. So, both his cheeriest and saddest scenes come highly charged with the energy of youthful optimism and teenage fear, leading to surprisingly heavy results once La Gradiva All said and done. Atlan may be merely an observer of this drama, but her aesthetic is so precise, so invisible and so organic, that the room between subjects and camera becomes filled with unpredictable texture. The image, like the plastered inhabitants of Pompeii, becomes a bridge in time, giving viewers the ability to traverse space and time, so that we sit side by side with these characters, remembering the most emotional moments of our formative years, and the materials that made us.
More in movie reviews
