The conflict to come and oblivion in between La Gradivathe story of French high school students who visit the ruins of Pompeii. The Cannes Critics’ Week pick (and Grand Prix winner) marks the feature debut of co-director Marine Atlan, who crafts a deeply moving story of volatile youth—played by amazing non-professionals—and their most poignant discoveries.
This film is one of the most home-grown naturals, but Atlan also shows great formal control. The sun slowly streams through the train compartment windows in the opening scene, as the hot young man James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) has sex with Angela (Hadya Fofana), a girl in his class. This hormone-charged introduction is one of a few La Gradiva it gives its characters such an intimate intimacy. Before long, it flashes back to reveal that the young couple is being watched by a curious onlooker Toni (Colas Quignard), a male classmate, who is eventually taken with James, but who also grows curious and complex during their educational journey. Atlan’s camera, for the most part, reflects Toni’s feelings of displacement by incorporating a point-of-view, fly-on-the-wall technique to capture the healthy abandonment of youth.
The Italian summer sun obscures and reveals in equal measure, making lenses haze in the morning and evening, while it illuminates young, intellectual debates during the day. The same sunlight also illuminates the old family photos Toni clings to, of her mysterious grandmother in her youth, when she lived in Naples—snapshots in time, not unlike the long-preserved Pompeii. For Toni, a young man cut off from his genealogy, the trip also offers the chance to learn more about his lost history, and what details in his long family stories he often misses.
The film’s full ensemble is completed by one Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a reserved and bookish girl who forms her strong opinions before exploding, and the hip children’s teacher Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi, the only veteran actress in the group). It’s rare for youth films to reasonably compare the possibility of teenage and middle-aged angst, but Mercier, as the hopeless youth shepherd, finds himself (more often than not) in the position of considering his life’s trajectory while his students await the results of their college applications.
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LA GRADIVA ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
As adults, the film’s young characters face the prospect of death for the first time, as they slowly learn about volcanic phenomena (or “gradiva”) and the sudden eruptions that engulfed the ancient victims of Vesuvius. This sense of life lived, but it was suddenly cut off, making a painful mirror in the life of the youth itself, as Angela faces the truth of being used by James, Suzanne finds a mysterious refuge in Toni (one with her), and their successive emotional explosions begin to show the eruption of a volcano-especially in the way Atlan tracks emotional elements. These are young people in love, who hate and adore their peers equally (as much as they hate and adore themselves), and their different understandings of the world, art, politics and history are constantly clashing.
What is true or false, which may be a historical charge or a fictitious one, feels ever-changing, threatening to turn even casual engagements into unexpected battles. So, Toni is walking on eggshells. This attitude extends especially to his enthusiasm with Mercier, who believes that he has abandoned his academic hopes. However, the active teacher is simply attuned to his own best inner life—a world where we, the audience, have a front row seat. So when he holds the pages of his personal assignment written quickly in his hands, as if disgusted, the impact of his mind is felt.
Like the long-dead Pompeian characters, Toni is a young man encased in plaster, mostly self-made. However, even the emotional youth of the film seem equally distant. Atlan and his fellow filmmaker Pierre Mazoyer use long, voyeuristic lenses to make even the audience feel like they are peering out, which has the double effect of making each viewer feel like a victim of the group, while also creating, around the camera subjects, invisible, self-imposed weapons.
That Toni is queer certainly plays into this dynamic. But La Gradiva and it treads the path of modern gangsterism, where it is socially authentic, but its performances powerfully shape the way the characters relate to each other, and themselves. For example, the question of James’ own sexuality is a mystery the movie didn’t feel the need to address, beyond the possibility that it was playing on Toni and Angela’s emotions, on purpose or otherwise. From the point of view of any old, ignorant observer: he’s a dumb teenager. However, the sense of immediacy and event created by Atlan’s camera (and Guillaume Lillo’s free, conversational editing) imbues each word and action with greater significance.
This is, for better or worse, the most important journey of these characters’ lives thus far. As such, its most exciting, and most heart-melting scenes come packed with the power of teenage optimism and teenage fear, leading to surprisingly heavy consequences as well. La Gradiva all said and done. Atlan may be just a spectator of the show, but his aesthetic is so well-tuned, abstract and alive, that the room between the subjects and the camera fills with unexpected textures. The image, like the concrete people of Pompeii, becomes a temporary bridge, giving the audience the ability to cross space and time, until we sit next to these characters, and remember the greatest emotional moments from our formative years, and the things that make us who we are.
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