Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center Mar. 6-16, 2025


MALOU KHEBIZI, IDIR AZOUGLI

AGATHE RIEDINGER: WILD DIAMOND/DIAMANT BRUT (2024)

Reality dreams

Some thought Wild Diamond/Diamant Brut, Agathe Riedinger's first feature, was getting ahead of itself in being included as a Cannes Competition film. Its thinness feels more so because its subject, the nineteen-year-old Liane (Malou Khebizi) is a blatantly superficial girl, a live Barbie doll who thinks of little or nothing that's more than skin deep. A lot of her time is spent on how she looks, her enlarged breasts, her buttucks, her skin, her lips, her hair.

But the film demands our attention by the way it captures a phenommenon of these days: the self-made online personality who exploits social media, what Owen Gleiberman calls in his [url="https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/wild-diamond-review-cannes-1236003568/"]Variety review[/url] "the up-from-nowhere apparatus of fame." There are other things Gleiberman says that I like, such as his calling Liane a "glam trainwreck" and his comment that the various devices she uses, the tarty-sexy clothes, the hydraulic acid lip injections to create a pouty mouth, make her "heartbreaking." He grasps Liane's world wonderfully. Even as he pities her he's into her. But I can't agree with him that all this announces Riedinger as "a major filmmaker." Riedinger has found an excellent subject, perhaps a career-best one. But if this is all she can do with her, if these, even with the final time of Christian penance, are Liane's limits and Riedinger's best effort, this feels like a flash in the pan.

Liane has 40,000 Tik Tok followers. She aspires to being an "influencer," and she has applied to be included in a popular reality show called "Miracle Island" - and been granted a momentous interview. Though she has to wait over a month afterwards to find out if she's been officially chosen by the judges to be part of the show, somehow it's a bit of a disappointment for us when she is in fact chosen. Is that what we've waited an hour and 43 minutes for? And is the tragic low point merely the moment when Liane gives herself a disastrous tattoo?

Wild Diamond does have special redeeming features. For me the greatest one is visual. I was surprised what a beautiful film this was. The cinematography of dp Noé Bach makes the Côte d'Azur glow permeate everything, Liane, the light, and the world around her, all the time. The use of the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, confining us to Liane's intense world, is like an imprisoning jewel box. It's one of those films that glows with the sunny warmth of the Mediterranean: it's full of the atmosphere of Fréjus and the summery South of Franc. Here where Liane lives with her mother and little sister, there are other girls like her. These are her best mates who are hard to distinguish from her when they're together. With them this world of the French Riviera, familiar to us already from decades ago, is updated. Liane is responsible for the care of her younger sister, and and surges with resentment and a dangerous temper from the indignity and abuse she suffered when young by being put into a "foyer," a home, by her neglectful mother.

This experience handily provides Liane with a boyfriend, Dino (Idir Azougli), who appears from her past: he too was in that "foyer." And he like many others has found her and been attracted by her online "glamor." Malou Khebizi as Liane indeed has a seedy glamor - one feels that she would be more attractive if she toned down and washed off all the glitz - as she does to prepare for the interview. Dino shows her a vacant building he says he is saving up to buy. Later, he declares his love for Liane and says she will always be his "queen." Because she has just been humiliated and insulted by her mother, she lashes out in anger and repels him at a club where her girlfriends already suspect he is her "mec," her guy. And part of the feel-good finale of this film is that this comes true. Alone together later, she apologizes for her rudeness, they embrace, and there's almost a fairytale romance feel.

This finale is cheap, it's superficial, and yet it's somehow touching. But it fades compared to a Mediterranean doomed romance classic like Manuel Pradal's 1997 [url="http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2900-MARIE-BAIE-DES-ANGES-(Manuel-Pradal-1997)"]Marie baie des anges/Marie from the Bay of Angels[/url], whose romance, also sunstruck, is simple and timeless. Riedinger depicts character, trends, and atmosphere well, but she is not a storyteller like Pradal. What makes this movie memorable is how freshly and vividly it depicts the wretched underside and dubious mystique of social media. And for that trendiness it gained entry into Cannes Competition.

Wild Diamond/Diamond brut, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 15, 2024, showing also at Munich, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Cairo, and other international festivals including Mumbai and Two Riversides Film and Art Festival, Poland. It opened theatrically in France Nov. 20, 2024, resulting in AlloCiné ratings of 3.3 press (66%) and 3.5 (70%) spectators. Strand Releasing in the US. Showing:
Monday, March 10 at 3:30pm
Saturday, March 15 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Agathe Riedinger

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