La Gradiva Review | Marine Atlan’s Enigmatic, Haunting Debut Might Be This Year’s Best Discovery

La Gradiva is about that precipice youthfulness inhabits before great churning. It’s the final school trip its central bunch would have together. College selections bookend the film. The seamlessly flowing narrative casts a microcosm of group dynamics. Interactions are webbed through with hurt, resentment, spite, confusion. But perhaps what’s most resonant is its complex, messy recognition of desire. How does it shift in reception and interpretation from one teenager to the next? Premiering in Cannes Critics’ Week, French filmmaker Marine Atlan’s debut feature spans a six-day school excursion, but it holds the range, power and unshakable hold of a full-blown saga. La Gradiva carries the spirit of great cinema: it folds several, myriad interlocking relationships even as it stares at history’s towering arch. Hormones rage, friends part, death strikes. Through it all, art and the past shine as reflecting forces.

The film kicks off with a bunch of French high-schoolers headed to Pompeii. An accomplished DP in her own right, Atlan stages a particularly revealing opening, interposing among three positions. In a train coop, the dashing philanderer, James (Mitia Capellier) is hooking up with a classmate he’d later discard. His best friend, Toni (Colas Quignard), spies almost grudgingly. Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), the class’s diligent quiet loner, watches Toni’s gaze. James, as we quickly discover, has no compunctions in his sexual life. He feels he owes no one any loyalty or romantic obligation. If someone would take issue with his customary disinterest especially after the hookup, hoping for explanations, he might just be bewildered. Seriousness of some basic respect doesn’t factor to him. He’s just as brash as Suzanne is retiring. James and Toni are disruptive influences in class, but this smartly bending film re-aligns, destabilises relationships along the way.

Suzanne steps back in the company of her classmates. In a piercing scene, she asserts being reconciled to her being “ugly”. Hence, she has no expectations. As she suggests, some people have to be unattractive for the prettier ones to land what they seek. The skewedness makes pursuits viable for the conventionally beautiful lot. But how comfortable and willing Suzanne truly is with being invisible and sidelined? Clearly, validation does matter to her.

She’s one of those people in class readily servicing the attention of the teacher. Their entire self-worth seems predicated on such approval and praise. So, when the accompanying Latin teacher, Mrs Mercier (Antonia Buresi), chides her, the humiliation is immense.

La Gradiva is a sprawling beast of a film, guided by astounding perceptiveness, a canny ability to soak in a place and a moment’s undercurrents. Anyone remotely interested in how teachers disburse information will get a pure kick. There are these long, intensely impassioned scenes of Mercier expounding, rallying for her students to be more curious and think actively about Plinian eruptions, the inference of bacchanalian rituals, how frescoes subtly give away the horrors of women who endured. La Gradiva is penetratingly alive to how we take in art in all its confounding mysteries and sudden bursts of epiphany.

The group is passing through highly seismic terrain, a region whose history of frequent earthquakes and volcanic flares still lingers in the air. Along with her co-writer, Anne Brouillet, Atlan weaves a loosely unfurling, dangerously riveting screenplay wherein imploding tension, clashes, disagreements and prejudice come thrillingly alive. A latter scene with the group huddled in conversation sharply establishes ruptures between the privileged students and those of working-class parents. Listen intently and you can even sense in some early right-wing urges. Atlan has a terrific ear for dialogue, a keen eye for diagnosing the latent chasms and chaos within relationships. There is exquisite sexual fluttering in moments when the queer Toni might nurse a greater degree of intimacy with James. We can discern the steady erosion in the bond between the friends. Atlan keeps mining delicate, extraordinary moments. When James confesses to Toni that he has never really loved anyone, it’s impossible not to detect the swell of heartache in the former himself.

Though La Gradiva is a dazzling ensemble display, the journey of these two male friends stays central. Capellier and Quignard take us fully captive. Gradually, boundaries between friendship and love arrestingly dissolve. When the faintly fantasised reciprocation doesn’t prop up, it’s no less than profound, irrevocable rejection, a cutting reminder to Toni of his disposability, his not being wanted or valued at all. Coupled with this is the eventual devastating discovery Toni, who has family roots in Pompeii, makes on the trip. All his illusions of love and devotion are brutally exposed. The very bedrock of his identity is left cloven.

A friendship-breakup, jagged sexual tension, the framing presence of history and art–every fine shade of life’s grand, unresolved drama–are drawn with precision in this brilliantly judged film. La Gradiva is as astonishingly intelligent as throbbingly human. Its dissections of behavioural habits and impulses land with shocking exactitude. It’s just May, but I doubt there’ll be another film this year that’ll have me quite as awed and shredded. Hours after the film, La Gradiva’s characters, its creeping atmosphere kept swimming up. This is an utterly entrancing debut.