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.
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.
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