“It was really like that”, even if the interpretation is perhaps sometimes a little “caricatural”: a few kilometers from Hayange (Moselle) where the plot of the film “Their children after them” takes place, the Residents who discovered it in advance smiled at the similarities with the 1990s they knew.
The film is adapted from the eponymous novel by Nicolas Mathieu, winner of the Goncourt Prize in 2018, which was a great success.
As in the novel, it is in Hayange, a town which has suffered the full brunt of deindustrialization, that the story of “Their children after them” takes place, a melancholic fresco on adolescence, social reproduction and inequalities.
The settings vary from small country roads surrounded by greenery to the working-class neighborhoods that flourished at the beginning of the 20th century in these towns of Lorraine, including the blast furnaces, permanently closed by Arcelor Mittal and the French state in 2013.
The only element that surprised the spectators who came in large numbers to discover the preview of the film, screened Friday in Thionville, to a sold-out audience: “We would really have liked to have a lake in Hayange, a beautiful lake like the one in the film”, laughed at the exit Aleyna, resident of Nilvange, a small town neighboring Hayange, who did not wish to give her last name and was 17 years old in 1998.
A bar in this town, closed for decades but which still opens one day a year “to keep its license”, served as a setting for the film, notably to relive the semi-final of the 1998 Football World Cup. .
For Aleyna, “the book” by Nicolas Mathieu was “harder than the film”.
– “France of the invisibles” –
In the novel, “there is both a very strong and very pointed social discourse, and at the same time, there is a generosity in the narration. And what we find very beautiful is that it tells the life of what we call, I find wrongly, the France of the invisibles”, which is in fact “the France of the majority, the France of everyone”, explain the directors, Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma, two twins 32 years old.
“I think we found ourselves a lot simply in the character of Anthony, in adolescence, in those endless summers, the boredom, the first loves,” confides Ludovic Boukherma, recalling that the two brothers grew up in “a rural area” in the southwest of France. “We wanted to make a popular film, in the fullest sense of the word.”
Upon release, many groups of people commented on the film. “Yes, I remember,” “that’s how it was!” they exclaim, smiles on their lips.
Denis, a resident of Hayange, also remembers his youth in the 90s. Before the film, he had read the book, which he considered “a bit caricatured. There, it still is… But hey , that’s how it was, basically, it’s true,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.
Jean-Maurice Tschemodanov, guardian of a cemetery in real life, has an extra role… and is even dead in the film. At the end, he said he was “very happy” with the result. For him, having actors “like Gilles Lellouche” in Moselle is magnificent.
– “Please” the residents –
“It’s important, when we return to the town in which we shot the film, that it pleases the locals,” emphasizes Hugo Sélignac, one of the producers. A successful bet, according to the people met by AFP at the end of the session.
For several years, the story follows the destiny of teenagers who grew up in Hayange but also their parents, including a father figure devoured by alcohol.
Adolescents dream of elsewhere but often find themselves forced to reproduce the pattern of their parents.
Paul Kircher received, at the age of 22, the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Newcomer in September at the Venice Film Festival. In “Their children after them” he plays the role of Anthony, one of the two main characters, a teenage son of workers, who is bored during the summer in Moselle, and dreams of love with the daughter of 'a notable.
The film, which lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes, was originally designed as a series, and is constructed in chapters, like so many summers – and losses of illusions, while the soundtrack also plunges the viewer back into the France in the 90s.
“Their children after them” is released on December 4 in cinemas in France.
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