Marine Atlan's lithe, perceptive, piercingly compassionate debut takes a chattering group of French high-schoolers on a devastatingly poignant trip to Pompeii and makes the coming-of-age genre feel reborn.
At 2 hours 25 minutes, Marine Atlan‘s stunning debut, “La Gradiva,” is long if you run a stopwatch. But by any other measure it is as quick as a breath — a deep, ragged but restorative breath — of seasalty, basalty air. It’s the first sniff of adulthood and the last gasp of childhood for a gaggle of French students, taken on a final-year school trip to Pompeii by a teacher determined to decant some last bit of cultural and historical appreciation into them. The smart kids, the shy ones, the jokers and the loners — every one of them is caught in the pyroclastic flow of adolescence, every minute a negotiation between fitting in and standing out. Seismically sensitive and deeply moving, Atlan’s film is simply one of the most piercingly accurate and immersive portrayals ever, of that fleeting moment when — not really a kid but still, really, a kid — you are simultaneously the most forcibly socialized and possibly the loneliest you will ever be.
In a rattling Italian train’s narrow passageway, Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin) brushes past Toni (Colas Quignard) as he observes his best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) having fumbling compartment sex with a classmate. Rejoining the rest of his rowdy group, Toni plays his music loud and — not for the first time, we intuit — draws the exasperated attention of his teacher, Mme Mercier (Antonia Buresi) who reminds him about his overdue homework. Toni responds with automatic excuses and insincere assurances that he shrugs off when James slides into the seat beside him. The boys joke about sex. Toni brags to anyone in earshot about his family’s roots in Naples. Suzanne, the sulky, artistic type, scowls and pointedly ignores their noisy energy.
Already now, Atlan has subtly cued us to watch over these three students in particular (and all three deliver astoundingly natural performances) but not at the expense of the rest of the remarkable young ensemble, nor of Mercier, an exhausted career Latin teacher who retains enough passion for her subject that her lessons on the art and history of Pompeii often spark the interest of even the disengaged kids. It’s basically incredible that this is a debut, as it manifests that rare form of directorial mastery by which a constructed world feels so large and complex that with a tilt of the camera a couple of degrees to one side or the other a whole different movie could unspool. In fact, between dinnertime political discussions (Atlan and Anne Brouillet’s brilliant screenplay is unusually alert to inherited social-class divisions among young people) and the parsing of a crush’s text message, impromptu soccer games and nighttime assignations, between all of the horseplay and all of the heartbreak, a hundred other films are unspooling — we just happen to be looking elsewhere right now.
Right now, we’re with Toni and James and they’re perched on a wall, ignoring the spectacular cliffside view, scrolling through Grindr looking for Toni’s next hookup. A more obvious film would have Toni’s sexuality be the central axis of its drama. But James and the rest of his class accept Toni’s gayness much the way he does: with simple Gen-Z disinterest. And if Toni’s a little attracted to James, he of the high, cruel cheekbones and tacit indications of privilege, well, most people are. Not least, we suspect, James himself, who has coolly ghosted Angela (Hadya Fofana) after their trainbound tryst and is keeping a casual eye out for his next conquest.
Endlessly recombining into different clusters — Atlan knows that a teenager is a shapeshifter to whom no one label can stick for very long — the classmates hang out and fall out. Sometimes their behavior is shockingly sophisticated, sometimes shockingly juvenile. Sometimes it is mired in self-delusion, like Toni’s obsession with his Neapolitan origins, perhaps the single shred of glamor in his otherwise unenviable family background. And sometimes it is viciously self-assessing as with quiet, solitary Suzanne’s confession to Angela and her other roommates that some women, like her, “have to be unfuckable for others to be fuckable.” In different ways, Toni’s romantic notions and Suzanne’s defensive cynicism just break you open. Both are so sure, and both are so wrong.
All the while, Vesuvius looms in the background as a metaphor so literally volcanic, it’s amazing that Atlan can keep it from overwhelming the life and vigor that bursts from every frame. But, caught up in “La Gradiva”‘s nimble dramaturgy, tracking its shifting allegiances and temporary truces, you are not cued to notice its craft, from the summer-Europop soundtrack, to the blocking of the complicated group scenes, to the deft camerawork (from Pierre Mazoyer and Atlan, who is herself also a cinematographer). Except, every now and then, you do notice and realize that “La Gradiva,” like many true things, is also very beautiful. The portraiture of the students’ faces, some inattentive, some enraptured, some finding themselves drawn into Mme Mercier’s enthusiasms in spite of themselves. The backdrop of the Bay of Naples and the frescoes and statues and plaster-body-casts of Pompeii. The sunny, breezy atmosphere of this stretch of Italian coast, that has so much air and light moving around and between the characters, it’s like they are illuminated from all sides at once.
To us, with our omniscient point of view, they are. But the one time you cannot see the mountain, is when you are standing on its slopes and “La Gradiva” builds to the realization that for each of its characters, the view is only ever partial. The human conundrum outlined here with such levity and gravity is that the tragedy that steals up on this rowdy bunch of nearly-grown-ups is nobody’s fault and everybody’s. Everyone had a tiny role to play, but unwittingly and based on incomplete information. We can all sometimes be careless and solipsistic — teenagers more than most — but here’s a film that begs us to pay attention to each other the way Atlan does, to cast the net of our compassion just a little bit wider, to try to sense the totality of a person beyond the little sliver we can see. The moon is never a crescent; it is always a sphere.
For once wholly earned and wholly revelatory, there comes a final snatch of voiceover, a dreamy echo back from the future that sets a seal on all these young lives, and then sets them free. It acts as a gently forceful admonishment to remember that, despite how bleak the world might sometimes seem, and despite how the promise of youth can, to the unlucky ones, feel more like a threat, it is just not true that “everything is dirty.” For one thing, in intent, in execution and finally in uplifting, devastating effect, “La Gradiva” is immaculate.