Marine Atlan’s first feature-length film, La Gradiva, takes audiences on a school trip to Naples and Pompeii with a group of French teenagers — and emerges as one of the most beautiful films of the year.
A Journey Through Naples and Pompeii
Chaperoned by their deeply committed teacher, Madame Mercier (played with excellence by Antonia Buresi), a group of lycée students sets out to discover Naples and the ruins of Pompeii. This is the director’s first excellent choice: this part of Italy possesses a quality that is at once splendid and dirty, majestic and chaotic, where many things seem frozen in time or evoke, for instance, the carefree spirit of the 1980s.
We meet three of these adolescents: Toni, James, and Suzanne. The first claims to want to trace his Italian grandmother’s footsteps, between two sexual encounters with local men via a dating app.
A Technically Masterful Film
La Gradiva is a remarkable film. Marine Atlan trained as a cinematographer, and technically the film is therefore top-notch, blending images that feel shot in amateur style with landscape shots and nocturnal atmospheres. On a deeper level, it captures a snapshot of youth before the passage into adulthood — a generation that is at once lost and knows what it wants, oscillating between amusement and fragility. There are many funny sequences and others far more sorrowful.
Robert Guédiguian Returns to Marseille
With a pace of nearly one film per year, Robert Guédiguian returns home to Marseille, to the Joliette district near the commercial port, where poverty sits alongside the opulence of Euroméditerranée, a vast urban development and business operation.
It is there, in a brand-new tower, that Juliette (Marilou Aussilloux) works — a finance prodigy, a class-transcender from a working-class family that itself has not moved socially. Her mother (played by Ariane Ascaride) views this social mobility with disapproval, as if by rising, her daughter were distancing herself from her social class — or even betraying it.
This question of fidelity to one’s social origins is one Guédiguian masters at his fingertips, and Marilou Aussilloux is convincing in the role. The Marseille director sometimes has a tendency to overload the narrative: Juliette’s mother learns late in life that her own mother was in fact the Arab maid when her family lived in Algeria, and therefore that her father certainly raped her. And a generation later, Juliette is in turn raped and, with her explosive temperament, moves from high finance to social action.
In short, many themes and actions are treated somewhat hastily, but the pleasure is there in reuniting with “Robert’s gang,” with special mention for Jean-Pierre Daroussin as a pied-noir who is endearing at first and frankly repugnant by the end.
