Maybe it’s a product of being a father of three myself, but I often find that my assignments at film festivals tend to be about youth stories. It’s also possible that the coming-of-age drama is the standard for the indie movement, regardless of its origin. The three films from this year’s Cannes are different in tone and setting, but all feature troubled young people trying to solve everyday problems and the big questions they’ll face in adulthood.
The best of the three belongs to Manuela Martelli “Meltdown,” a drama that manages to be a thriller but eschews elements of the mystery process in favor of a more consistent state of mind. It’s a well-made film that feels narratively thin, but almost feels purposeful. After all, it’s a movie about tangled emotions and how easy it is for something or someone to get lost in the night. So it should be kind of slippery on your fingers. Martelli is clearly a talented filmmaker, and his work here marks him as one to watch.
The “Meltdown” happened at an Andean ski resort in Chile in 1992. Nine-year-old Ines (Maya O’Rourke) lives there with her grandparents, watching the big kids ski down the mountain. He is very taken with 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae), who seems like a big sister. Hanna’s beauty has drawn the attention of the older men around her, giving the early scenes of “The Meltdown” a sense of dread.
When Hanna goes missing one night, fingers point to a boy she’s been talking to or maybe her strict teacher. His mother Lina (the excellent Saskia Rosendahl) comes to the region to join the search and Martelli maintains a soft tone closer to confusion than procedure. Part of this is saved by how much we see through the eyes of Ines, a girl who just wants her friend back more than anything else.
It is worth noting that Chile in 1992 had just come out of the Pinochet regime, which was focused on disappearance, and that the film refers directly to the event in April of that year when the iceberg was transported from Antarctica to the Universal Exposition of Seville, apparently seen as a symbol of the new Chile. Part of Martelli’s drama seems to ask what exactly has changed when 15-year-old girls can disappear?
It’s too long and could have used more depth in its supporting characters, but, again, those elements feel thrown together in an attempt to tell this story through the innocent eyes of a child, a time when people often learn how dangerous the world can be.
The protagonists of Julien Gasper-Oliveri “La Frappe (The Blow)” he had to learn that truth by accident at a very young age, and at home. The central problem of Gasper-Oliveri’s film is the impossibility of Enzo Comini (Diego Murgia), whose father Anthony (Bastien Bouillon) is released from prison as the film opens. Although the script is deliberately vague for much of the running time about the details of Enzo and Anthony’s childhood, we do know that it’s bad; so bad that Enzo’s sister Carla (Romane Fringeli) refuses to have anything to do with him and is furious that her brother chose the opposite. Enzo is caught in the middle, pulled between a loving sister and an abusive parent. On paper, that may sound like an easy choice for adults who have gone to therapy, but teenagers, especially those whose growth has been stunted by trauma, will often do anything to keep a parent in their life, even unforgivable forgiveness.
Gaspar-Oliveri has a deep well of sympathy for Enzo, often zooming his camera to his emotional face or tracing his body in the film’s opening scene. He repeatedly returns to images of Enzo and/or Carla sleeping, almost as if this is one of the times they can find peace. As a writer, he holds back a lot about the depth of Anthony’s abuse, but that almost fits the POV of the film in that Enzo himself doesn’t want to think or talk about what happened as he tries so hard to move on. That we know this isn’t possible gives the film a tense tension as we wait for Enzo’s new reality to be destroyed by his old one.
As it approaches its final act, “La Frappe” hits a few beats over and over again, making the emotional score and narrative more times than it needs to. It sounds like a drama that spins its wheels a few times before finding the road again, but it usually does so with a strong choice of Murgia or Fringeli. These are talented young actors who disappear into the characters, giving the production an echo of another Cannes favorite: the Dardennes brothers. Like those masters of verité, we tend to forget the craft of filmmaking here, just watching two young people fight something they can’t overcome: their past.
Artifice is what breaks and sinks Katharina Rivilis’ offensive “I’m leaving in June.” A solid middling performance from newcomer Naomi Cosma gets lost in a dull screenplay that often sounds like it was written by someone who’s never even been to the United States. With a producer credit made by the great Wim Wenders, one would expect a bit of cultural interference, but there is a difference between his US professional studies and this version of the 2001 New Mexico fantasy, something that someone in Germany might imagine instead of something that actually happened or a place that actually existed. Rivilis leans on a lot of literature about the US from religion to publishing the country to guns, and that’s before he gets 9/11 off his screen.
Cosma plays Franny, a young German who comes to live with a family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From the beginning, his host family registers as the worst (and unbelievable due to the cryptic line readings). Mom doesn’t give him a ride home from school because he’s a few minutes late and doesn’t let him eat the second apple because they can’t afford it. The idea of a dysfunctional American family is unrealistic, but the screen sinks even more when Rivilis chooses to inject 9/11 into the story, showing clips on TVs that look much older than 2001 and forcing negative conversations about war and patriotism into the mouths of young people, most of them instead of the mouths of real people.
Against this backdrop, Franny begins a short-term relationship with a clueless musician named Elliott (David Flores), who also graduated from Clichéd American Teen 101. Elliott is so boring that one can’t figure out how Franny, thanks to Cosma’s heavy lifting, is good-looking, smart, and funny. Is Rivilis commenting on the shallow vapidity of the American experience in 2001? If so, that element is not configured enough.
The worst sin of “I’ll Be Gone By June” is its dialogue, which all sounds like the product of a German writer instead of the way teenagers really did in the Southwest at the turn of the millennium. Except for a few bits, almost everyone and everything in “I’ll Be Gone in June” feels like the product of a screenwriter instead of the real thing. It has no weight in the real world.
