Coming of age clashes with oblivion in La Gradivaa story of French high school students visiting the ruins of Pompeii. The Cannes Critics’ Week selection (and Grand Prize winner) marks the director/co-writer’s feature debut Atlantic Maritimewhich creates an incredibly moving story of volatile young people – played by extraordinary non-professionals – and their sharpest self-discoveries.
The film is a film of naturalism, but Atlan also displays a remarkable formal control. The sun streams gently through the windows of the train compartment in an early scene, as hot young James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) has sex with Angela (Hadja Fofana), a girl in his class. This hormone-charged presentation is one of those rare moments La Gradiva gives her characters such intimate intimacy. Before long, she pulls back to find the new lovers being watched by curious onlooker Tony (Colas Quignard), their queer male outsider friend, who ends up with James, but whose dynamic with him becomes more curious and complex during their academic pilgrimage. Atlani’s camera, for the most part, reflects Toni’s feelings of detachment by embodying an observational, fly-on-the-wall approach to capturing a teenage spiritual abandonment.
The Italian summer sun darkens and reveals in equal measure, creating lens-like fogs at dawn and dusk, while illuminating youthful, intellectual debates during the day. The same sunlight illuminates the old family photographs that Tony clings to, of his mysterious 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 ancestry, this excursion also presents the opportunity to learn more about his lost history and what details of his long family tales are often missed.
The film’s large ensemble is completed by lonely friend Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a reserved and bookish girl whose strong opinions build before they explode, and by the children’s teacher, Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresithe only veteran actor in the group). Rare are teen movies that meaningfully juxtapose the prospect of youth with the forlorn middle age, but Mercier, as the pessimistic teenage shepherd, finds herself (more often than not) in a position to reflect on her own life’s trajectory while her students await the results of their college applications.
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LA MATERIALS ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
On the precipice of adulthood, the film’s young protagonists face the prospect of mortality for the first time as they slowly learn about the volcanic materials (or “gradiva”) and sudden eruptions that surrounded Vesuvius’ ancient victims. This sense of a life lived but suddenly cut short makes for an unsettling reflection on teenage life itself, as Angela faces the reality of being used by James, Suzanne finds strange refuge in Tony (a fellow stranger), and their respective emotional outbursts begin to mirror volcanic eruptions—especially in the way Atlani traces the noisy 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 respective understandings of the world, art, politics and history collide frequently.
What is or is not, what may or may not constitute a historical transgression or modern social faux pas feels in constant flux, threatening to turn even the most mundane interactions into unpredictable skirmishes. And so, Tony walks on eggshells. This humor especially extends to his dynamic with Mercier, who believes he has given up on his academic prospects. However, the otherwise conscientious teacher is only so attuned to his sprawling inner life—a world in which we, the audience, have a front-row seat. So when she fingers the pages of his hastily written personal assignment, as if disgusted by her, the impact on his psyche feels monumental.
Like casts of long-dead Pompeians, Tony is a young man encased in plaster, usually self-made. Yet even the film’s most expressive teenagers come across a similar distance. Atlan and her co-cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer use long voyeuristic lenses to make the audience feel like they’re also looking in from the outside, which has the dual effect of making each viewer feel like an outcast from a clique while creating, around the camera’s subjects, an invisible, self-imposed armor.
The fact that Tony is queer certainly plays into this emotional dynamic. But La Gradiva it also treads into a more modern form of queerness, where it’s a social issue, but its contours no less strongly shape how the characters relate to each other and to themselves. For example, the issue of James’ own sexuality is a mystery that the film doesn’t feel the need to open up, beyond the fact that he can play with Tony and Angela’s emotions, intentionally or otherwise. From the perspective of any nostalgic adult viewer: he’s just a dumb teenager. However, the sense of immediacy and occasion created by Atlan’s camera (and Guillaume Lillohis fluent conversational editing) imbues every word and action with monumental importance.
This is, for better or worse, the most important journey of these characters’ new lives thus far. So his cheerier, more melancholic scenes come charged with the energy of youthful optimism and teenage fear, leading to surprisingly heavy-handed conclusions at times. La Gradiva everything is said and done. Atlan may be merely an observer of this drama, but her aesthetic approach is so precise, so invisible and organic, that the room between the subjects and the camera is filled with an unpredictable texture. The image, like the plaster men of Pompeii, becomes a temporal bridge, allowing viewers to cross space and time until we sit next to these characters and recall the most emotionally charged moments from our formative years and the materials that created us.
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