Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s beautiful launching film about puppy love, fantastically acted and directed. It is a suggestion of how basically dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the psychological dramas of our teenager years, and to declare we just wish to inform our more youthful selves to unwind and get a sense of humour. In truth, those long-repressed minutes of ecstasy and embarrassment, so hazardous and potentially explosive, will direct us for the rest of our lives, whether we acknowledge it.Atlan’s title is a recommendation to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novella Gradiva, much appreciated 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 walks”, and envisions that she existed in Pompeii in AD79, the time of the great 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, imagine a dynamic class of talented French teens (played by newcomers) being led on a demanding however exciting school journey to Pompeii and Naples by their instructor, Mercier, had fun with exceptional intelligence and compassion by Antonia Buresi. She has been given the edge of quiet breakdown by psychological frustration and the thankless job of keeping these kids in line. There is an amusing and heartbreaking minute when she is asked by the Italian coach chauffeur if she is “on her own”, and start a thoughtful monologue about being without a partner or kids– before she realises he was asking if she was leading this class with or without a colleague.There is one particular student who is winding up Mercier; that is Toni (Colas Quignard), who plays his music aggravatingly loudly on the train heading to Italy and has actually failed to get his research assignment in, despite limitless extensions. And it is Toni whom Atlan puts at the centre of the movie’s opening tableau on the train in a strange, powerful nexus of sexual tension. Toni is simply outside the door of a couchette, secretly looking in with unreadable voyeurism at his good-looking good friend James(Mitia Capellier-Audat )and Angela (Hadya Fofana) who have actually simply made love; later on, James will delicately expose to Toni that it indicated absolutely nothing to him.At the very same time, secretly watching Toni
from completion of the corridor is Suzanne(Suzanne Gerin ), a clever, disaffected lady who is captivated by Toni and James, and who feels herself the least attractive of the class; she is much given to morosely checking out 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 women’dormitory, Suzanne listens with mad absence of empathy to Angela when she grumbles that James is now cruelly declining to address her texts, stating that these are problems she wishes she has and they should be grateful to her for not being hot.”Some women need to be unfuckable for others to be fuckable,”she states. Atlan develops a vividly intense dream sequence for the unhappy, self-important Suzanne in which she appears as the Gravida in Pompeii and likewise has sex with Angela.As for Toni, he considers his issues and his own backstory to be the most crucial of all, and he is amazed by the individual significance of this journey to Pompeii. His mom has constantly informed him that her mother, Toni’s grandma, was a maid in a grand castle in Pompeii having an awful love affair with the noble master, and needed to leave when the castle was decreased to debris and chaos by the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy. It was this poignantly prohibited 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 more about, discussed her departure to France. Toni likes to get high in Pompeii and hook up with guys he fulfills online, but his main mission is to find the fact about his noble lineage.Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are incredible; Mercier patiently, sometimes madly, attempts to get
the students to value the complexity, subtlety, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork. An unpopular guy called Jean-Eudes (Mathéo De Carlo)thrills Mercier and irritates the whole class with his fantastic exegesis of the images. Mercier brings simply as much dedication to an alfresco geological class in which the students have to learn more about the origin of volcanoes. And there is similar sinew and interest to the pupils’own night conversations of politics, racism and sexism, to which Mercier frequently tolerantly listens.Atlan reveals that Suzanne’s own sense of self-respect is restored, not by suddenly being fortunate in love, but in different occasions which reveal her in a not-so-flattering light. She effectively embarrasses James with a nasty trick, she does extremely 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 moving sense of status becomes part of the mysterious darkness that is to engulf the story; it is extremely unfortunate and sombre. La Gradiva screened at the Cannes movie festival.