Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s stunning launching film about young love, magnificently acted and directed. It is a pointer of how fundamentally dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the emotional dramas of our teenager years, and to claim we just wish to inform our more youthful selves to unwind and get a sense of humour. In reality, those long-repressed moments of ecstasy and embarrassment, so hazardous and possibly explosive, will direct us for the rest of our lives, whether or not we acknowledge it.Atlan’s title is a recommendation to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novella Gradiva, much admired by Sigmund Freud, in which an archaeologist is transfixed by the image he sees in a Roman museum of a female he names “Gradiva”, or “she who strolls”, and pictures that she existed in Pompeii in AD79, the time of the excellent Vesuvius eruption; it is something about transplanting the image to a time of such catastrophe that brings him to an understanding of his own lost love.Atlan and her co-writer, Anne Brouillet, picture a lively class of gifted French teens (played by newbies) being led on a demanding however amazing school trip to Pompeii and Naples by their teacher, Mercier, played with superb intelligence and compassion by Antonia Buresi. She has been given the brink of quiet breakdown by psychological frustration and the thankless job of keeping these kids in line. There is a funny and heartbreaking moment when she is asked by the Italian coach chauffeur if she is “on her own”, and embarks on a thoughtful monologue about lacking a partner or kids– before she understands he was asking if she was leading this class with or without a colleague.There is one specific pupil who is winding up Mercier; that is Toni (Colas Quignard), who plays his music irritatingly loudly on the train heading to Italy and has stopped working to get his research project in, regardless of unlimited extensions. And it is Toni whom Atlan puts at the centre of the movie’s opening tableau on the train in a mystical, potent nexus of sexual tension. Toni is just outside the door of a couchette, covertly looking in with unreadable voyeurism at his good-looking good friend James(Mitia Capellier-Audat )and Angela (Hadya Fofana) who have actually just had sex; later on, James will delicately reveal to Toni that it suggested absolutely nothing to him.At the same time, covertly watching Toni
from completion of the passage is Suzanne(Suzanne Gerin ), a wise, disaffected lady who is fascinated by Toni and James, and who feels herself the least attractive of the class; she is much given to morosely reading Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. And, yes, she is probably reading excessive into the evident association of victimhood and cleverness in the title. In the girls’dormitory, Suzanne listens with mad lack of compassion to Angela when she complains that James is now cruelly refusing to answer her texts, saying that these are problems she wants she has and they ought to be grateful to her for not being hot.”Some females have to be unfuckable for others to be fuckable,”she states. Atlan produces a clearly intense dream series for the unhappy, self-important Suzanne in which she looks like the Gravida in Pompeii and also makes love with Angela.As for Toni, he considers his issues and his own backstory to be the most essential of all, and he is electrified by the personal significance of this journey to Pompeii. His mom has actually constantly informed him that her mother, Toni’s grandmother, was a housemaid in a grand castle in Pompeii having a tragic love affair with the noble master, and had to leave when the castle was reduced to debris and mayhem by the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy. It was this poignantly forbidden love affair that caused his grandma to get pregnant, Toni thinks, and the earthquake, so thrillingly comparable to the Vesuvius eruption they are here to learn about, discussed her departure to France. Toni likes to get high in Pompeii and hook up with guys he meets online, however his main mission is to find the reality about his worthy lineage.Teaching scenes in films constantly have a fascination for me, and these are incredible; Mercier patiently, often madly, tries to get
the trainees to value the intricacy, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork. An unpopular guy called Jean-Eudes (Mathéo De Carlo)thrills Mercier and irritates the entire class with his fantastic exegesis of the images. Mercier brings simply as much dedication to an alfresco geological class in which the students need to learn more about the origin of volcanoes. And there is similar sinew and interest to the students’own night discussions of politics, bigotry and sexism, to which Mercier often tolerantly listens.Atlan reveals that Suzanne’s own sense of self-worth is brought back, not by all of a sudden being lucky in love, but in numerous occasions which reveal her in a not-so-flattering light. She effectively humiliates James with a nasty trick, she does very well in her college admissions– probably the very best of the class– and is the intimate witness to Toni’s disillusion. Suzanne has a brilliant sense, which Atlan communicates to the audience, that she is among life’s winners after all. And this shifting sense of status becomes part of the mysterious darkness that is to swallow up the story; it is overwhelmingly unfortunate and sombre. La Gradiva screened at the Cannes film celebration.