By Jason Osiason
La Gradiva is insanely good cinema. I don’t know a less embarrassing way to say it. Marine Atlan captures so much of the cruelty and tenderness of being seventeen that I was completely caught up in these kids, including the ones I didn’t particularly like. I loved listening to them. Watching the film finish was considerably harder.
The setup is a French class on a school trip to Pompeii, which sounds like a movie you’d be shown in a French class. For about ten minutes, it almost plays like one. Then you start noticing who’s looking at whom, who wants attention and who can afford to pretend they don’t. These kids talk about art and death and culture with the intelligence of people who’ve read everything once. They’re genuinely interested, too, even if somebody’s sex life becomes more interesting a minute later. Atlan lets those conversations run long enough for their curiosity and their stupidity to come through.
She moves between the characters easily, though Colas Quignard’s Toni is the one I became most attached to. He has shaky self-esteem and a family history he needs to believe makes him somebody. Being Italian matters enormously to him, especially now that he’s in Italy, where he hopes those stories will finally mean something to someone else. Watching that hope meet the actual place is painful. Quignard makes Toni easy to bond with even when you can see him making things harder for himself. I wanted his discoveries to be good ones. And I loved how ordinary the film allows his being gay to be. There are other things he’s trying to figure out about himself, and Atlan gives those just as much attention.
Mitia Capellier-Audat’s James has the confidence Toni could use some of. He seems comfortable being watched, and Capellier-Audat makes that confidence irritatingly convincing. You understand why people pay attention to him. Putting the two performances beside each other tells you a lot about their friendship without requiring either boy to explain it. I kept finding myself watching Toni’s response to James as much as James himself.
Atlan shares the cinematography with Pierre Mazoyer, and the film is gorgeous. The train interiors have the richness of paintings, but the people inside them are restless and distracting enough that you’re never just admiring the image. Those brief flashes the film cuts to stayed with me, too, like something half-remembered that I couldn’t quite place. Then there’s the Italian dinner scene, with its long, loud table and the pleasure of being allowed to sit there for a while. I would have happily stayed longer.
I kept thinking about Larry Clark’s Kids and Call Me by Your Name: the casual cruelty of the first, the longing and Italian beauty of the second. But I was more interested in following these particular people than working out the comparison. Atlan makes their embarrassment, their interests, and their need to be wanted worth paying attention to for the whole film. By the end, I cared about them enough that it hurt. Easily one of the year’s best. I’d see it again tonight. [A]
