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Here is a cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s first beautiful film about young love, well acted and directed. It’s a reminder of how dishonest and pseudosophisticated it really is to laugh indiscriminately at the events of our youth, and that we just want to tell our younger selves to relax and have a sense of humor. In fact, those long-suppressed moments, the fun and the embarrassing, the scary and the scary, will guide us for the rest of our lives, whether we admit it or not.
Atlan’s name is descriptive Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novella Gradivamuch appreciated by Sigmund Freud, in which an archaeologist is transfixed by a picture he sees in a Roman museum of a woman he calls “Gradiva”, or “she who walks”, and thinks she was present in Pompeii in AD79, the time of the great eruption of Vesuvius; it’s something about placing the statue in a time of such tragedy that makes him understand his lost love.
Atlan and his co-writer, Anne Brouillet, imagine a charming class of talented young French people (played by newcomers) being led on a difficult but exciting school trip to Pompeii and Naples by their teacher, Mercier, played intelligently and sympathetically by Antonia Buresi. He has been driven to quiet destruction by the mental anguish of the thankless task of keeping these children in line. There is a funny and sad moment when he is asked by the Italian teacher’s driver if he is “alone”, and he begins to think deeply about being without a friend or children – before realizing that he is asking if he is leading this class or not.
There is another student who is finishing Mercier; that is Toni (Colas Quignard), who sings his songs loudly on the train to Italy and he has failed to find his homework, even though he is always adding it. And it is Toni whom Atlan places at the center of the film’s opening scene in this strange, deeply sexual train. Toni is outside the door of the couchette, secretly looking with an incalculable voyeurism at her beautiful friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) and Angela (Hadya Fofana) who have just had sex; later, James will casually reveal to Toni that it means nothing to him.
At the same time, secretly watching Toni from the end of the corridor is Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a smart, indifferent girl who is attracted to Toni and James, and considers herself to be the least of the class; he is much given to proudly reading Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. And, yes, maybe he’s reading too much into the apparent brutality and wisdom of the subject. In the girls’ room, Suzanne listens with unsympathetic anger to Angela as she complains that James is now rudely refusing to answer her texts, saying that these are the problems she wants him to have and she should thank him for not getting angry. He said: “Some women have to be comfortable with others being sexually active. Atlan creates a vivid dream sequence for Suzanne’s unhappy, arrogant self in which she looks like Gravida in Pompeii and has sex with Angela.”
As for Toni, she sees her problems and her history as the most important thing of all, and is motivated by the importance of this trip to Pompeii. Her mother always told her that her mother, Toni’s grandmother, was a maid in the palace in Pompeii when she had a tragic affair with her master, and had to leave when the palace was in ruins and chaos. The 1980 earthquake in southern Italy. It is this forbidden love that made his grandmother pregnant, Toni believes, and an earthquake, very similar to the eruption of Vesuvius that he is here to study, explained his trip to France. Toni likes to hike to Pompeii and hang out with guys she meets online, but her main goal is to discover the truth about her noble lineage.
Teaching in film is always fun for me, and this is a big one; Mercier patiently, sometimes aggressively, tries to get the students to notice the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and paintings. A vain young man named Jean-Eudes (Mathéo De Carlo) amuses Mercier and angers the whole class with his comic interpretation. Mercier also brings a lot of dedication to the alfresco geological class where students have to learn about where the volcanoes are. And there is a similar interest in the students’ evening discussions about politics, racism and racism, which Mercier often listens to.
Atlan shows that Suzanne’s sense of self-worth is restored, not because of her sudden luck in love, but through various events that show her disinterest. He embarrasses James with a nasty prank, excels at college admissions – possibly top of the class – and is a close witness to Toni’s depression. Suzanne has a clear impression, which Atlan conveys to the audience, that she is one of the best in life. And this shift in nature is part of the mysterious darkness that must submerge the story; it is very sad and sad.
