The adaptation of the 2018 Goncourt Prize, the novel Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, is released in theaters on December 4, 2024. Discover our opinion on the film by the brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma as well as a first extract.
Presented in official selection at the last Venice Exhibition from where she left with the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Newcomer for Paul Kircher, the adaptation by the brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma from the book Their Children after Them by Nicolas Mathieu (Prix Goncourt 2018) is expected in French theaters on December 4, 2024.
August 92 in Heillange (the fictional counterpart of Hayange in Moselle), a lost valley in the East, rusty blast furnaces which no longer burn, mining city. Anthony (Paul Kircher), fourteen years old, bored. One hot afternoon at the lake, he meets Stéphanie (Angelina Woreth). Love at first sight was such that that same evening, he secretly borrowed his father’s motorcycle (Gilles Lellouche) to go to a party where he hopes to find her. When the next morning he realizes that the motorcycle has disappeared, his life is turned upside down.
From 1992 to 1998, the film, which is divided into two-year periods in the manner of the novel, follows Anthony’s life; and like the chapters of Nicolas Mathieu’s book, it is also crossed by period music (Modern Talking, Boney M, Metallica, NTM, our national Johnny). The Boukherma brothers sign here a successful but careful adaptationwithout real flights or sparks of staging.
The film explores the universal themes of l’adolescenceof the first loves which stretch over years and search for identity – or how to escape from one’s original environment – and for this reason it is reminiscent of another theatrical film, L’Amour Ouf by Gilles Lellouche. The French actor and director also wanted to bring the Goncourt adaptation to the screen before preferring to concentrate on the adaptation of Neville Thompson’s book. And like Lellouche’s film, Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma’s feature film struggles to touch the heart.
The director duo still managed to make their film a real little retro candy which sucks for two hours thanks to a meticulous reconstruction, its languor capturing the long time of the holidays and the boredom of the youth of the regions. But his gallery of actors has difficulty becoming endearing, with the exception of Lellouche and his character all in granularity and relief of Anthony’s father, a notorious alcoholic but not a bad guy, and Paul Kircher, definitely one of the actors of his generation to follow very closely.
It is also a shame that the two directors did not find the time to give more importance, during the 2h15 film all the same, to the economic context of this French region sacrificed on the altar of globalization – a central theme in the work of Nicolas Mathieu.
A first extract from Their Children after Them by the Boukherma brothers (2024):
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