GILLES LELOUCHE

LUDOVIC BOUKHERMA, ZORAN BOUKHERMA: AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM/LEURS ENFANTS APRÈS EUX (2024) - RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2025

An admired coming of age novel set in '19's France about class, deindustrialiaation, and diminished hopes

This adaptation establishes the focus right away on youth Anthony Casati (Paul Kircher) and his cousin (Louis Memmi) in the summer, in the Fensch valley (vallée de la Fensch) in northeastern France. It is a desolate area with dormant blast furnaces and a lake with cities the deindustrialization of the time has left empty, others remaining impverished. For two decades we have been learning from movies about the French banlieues, housing projects ringing around French cities where poverty, racial conflict, and crime abound and popular arts like hip hop and parcour are practiced, a setting where lively indigenous action films like Ma 6-T va crack-er have flourished. We haven't heard so much about the Fensch valley or lost steel mills. The prize-winning novel by Nicolas Mathieu depicts the coming of age and disenchantment story adapted by the Bukherma twins, Ludovic and Zoran in their feature film debut. It's an ambitious film that might have used more narrative economy and clarity but contains some dramatic scenes and lively performances.

What happens is that Anthony is woven in and out of the loosely told tale, with four summer touch points ending in 1998, that provides us with bad-boy flirting and a stolen canoe, gate crashing, and a feud with an Arab boy over a stolen motorbike as a framework to hang a portrait of a generation struggling to come out of nothing.

Anthony initially steals the motorbike from his embittered and depressed alcoholic father Patrick (veteran actor and director Gilles Lellouche) to attend a bourgeois party. He and his cousin met girls who invited him when they stole the boat club canoe on the lake. To get to where the posh people live he and his cousin can't walk. But the motorboke is sacred and it's almost suicidal when he takes it, definitely so when some Arab boys, including Hacine (up-and-comer Sayyid El Alami) who get rudely expelled when they crash the fête, steal Patrick's moto for parts in misplaced revenge thus, in a way, punishing their own underclass.

This event, the fight at the party between Anthony and Hacine, and the theft of the motorboke, resonates through the years that follow in four subsequent summers till Anthony, who has not wound up "at Austen, in Texas" as he boasted to Stéphanie (Angelina Woreth), the girl he first met at the lake, winds up after a bout in the army in a medial job reencountering Hacine in a "friendly" atmosphere, the jubilation of the 1998 when "les bleus", the French national team, have won the nation's forst World Cup in soccer. He talks Hacine into letting him take a solo ride on his bike. He steals it for a while, to visit Stéphanie. But it's over.

There's not much sex in the story. It's as if poverty has diminished the sex drive.

We get a picture, however momentary, of the life of Hacine, who's a Moroccan immigrant and gets sent back the the bled for a while for the trouble he stirs by destroying Patrick's moto. There is a different, less definable tension with his father Malek (Lounès Tazairt). They address each other in French, not Moroccan Arabic. There is a cultural and generational cloud that separates them but not the cloud of alcohol and defeat.

The opening canoe-stealing scene with the hush of the lake had promise, but this film, for all its ambition, becomes a disappointment as if meanders on. Enthusiastically acted but criticized as more superficial compared to the Goncourt winning novel source, it was also callled 'baggy' by Guy Lodge in his Variety)) review.

The blurb calls the film "Inspired equally by the works of Émile Zola and Bruce Springsteen" but that's just the trouble: neither fits, ahd successive loud pop song passages are a simplistic way of injecting period flavor. Lodge suggests the more literary allusisons, including John Steinbeck, have been lost in an adaptaption he finds executed "with an earnest heart and a heavy hand."

Paul Kircher, so of French actors Jérome Kirchder and Irène Jacob, is virtally French cinematic royalty and definitely going places. He would seem a good young actor to hang your melodramatic class-conscious coming of age movie on. But he comes off less well here than he did in in the previous year's French sci-fi hit Animal Kingdom, where his child-like intensity, baby face and bee-sting lips play well as just a kid to Romain Duris's rugged dad, maybe even better the year before as the precocious but troubled gay boy from the provinces arrived In Paris in Le Lycéen as a younger version of the pooymath writer-director from Rennes Chistohe Honoré, who formerly adopted Louis Garrel, then Vincent Lacoste as his muses or alter egos. In Winter Boy (the English title), Kircher performs the feat of making instability and anguish feel lighthearted. He got nominated for César for the Most Promising Young Male Actor (Meilleur Espoir Masculin) for both of these films. In this new one, also a big French film, Kircher is fourteen when first seen. The subsequent years, including the brief military stint, don't seem to harden him. Nonetheless he has a great presence and he won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice for this perfornance. He is definitely an actor to watch, and so is Sayyid El Alami, whom we don't get to see enough of here. (He has a bigger role in the higher rated Cannes Critics' Week film La Pampa/Block Pass, which opens in Paris March 5.)

And Their Children After Them/Leurs Enfants après eux, 146 mins., debuted in competition at Venice Aug. 31, 2024, showing also at Namur, Rio, Bordeaux and Leiden. French release Dec. 4, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 3.5 press, 3.6 spectators (70%, 72%). Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showing:
Thursday, March 13 at 1:00pm
Saturday, March 15 at 3:15pm – Q&A with Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma


PAUL KIRCHER, ANGELINA WORETH

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.