French film December event, Their children after them is a melancholic fresco on adolescence and social determinism, adapted from the 2018 Goncourt Prize. In theaters this Wednesday.
Their children after them arrives in theaters on Wednesday, plowing the furrow of the generational fresco after the success of Love phew and making peripheral France in the 1990s a cinematic landscape.
Faithful adaptation of the 2018 Goncourt Prize, the film strikes the same heartstrings by following over a few years the destiny of teenagers in a town in Lorraine hit by deindustrialization and describes the impossible love story between a worker's kid and the daughter of a notable.
The book, which propelled Nicolas Mathieu, hit the right note by painting the portrait of a peripheral France often forgotten and of its youth dreaming of elsewhere but condemned to reproduce the path of their parents.
A Bourdieusian story and working-class heroes in which the directors, Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma, 32, twin brothers who grew up in the countryside, in a working-class family in the southwest of France, recognized themselves.
Star amount
The main role is played by one of the rising stars of French cinema, Paul Kircher, who thus closes a trilogy on adolescence: after his first steps with Christophe Honoré (The High School Student), it exploded last year in The Animal Kingdomawarded five Césars.
In the skin of Anthony, the son of “proles” who dreams of love, he won the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Newcomer at the Venice Film Festival in September.
In Their children after themit is also a question of the relationship with the parents: the mother is played by Ludivine Sagnier and the father figure, dissolved in alcohol, unemployment and violence, by Gilles Lellouche.
The 52-year-old actor originally wanted to adapt Nicolas Mathieu's novel himself. He finally entrusted the creation to others, too absorbed by the creation of another generational fresco with large resources, Love phewreleased in October and which exceeded 4 million admissions in theaters.
Nirvana and Florent Pagny
Long (2h26), Their children after them” was originally conceived as a series, and remains constructed, like the book, in chapters, like so many summers and losses of illusions.
They are punctuated by a soundtrack in the form of a Proust madeleine for those who turned 15 in the 1990s, a cover of Nirvana (even if the filmmakers had to give up the Smells Like Teen Spirit of the book for a Red Hot Chili Peppers title), to Florent Pagny and Francis Cabrel via Bruce Springsteen.
It is on this sound background that the trajectory of these young people is constructed, from Steph, Anthony's inaccessible love played by Angelina Woreth, to Hacine, the enemy brother from the neighboring city, raised alone by his immigrant father from Morocco, and performed by Sayyid El Alami (the series Oussekine).
American aesthetic
The film, with its sometimes American aesthetic, hides nothing from French fractures but also celebrates moments of communion, including the summer of 1998 and “black-white-beur” France vibrating for the World Cup.
“We are in a city where the blast furnaces have closed and the working class has just exploded. It's a bit like the foundations of today's France, with the rise of the extreme right and the French separated between Ethnic French, if that makes any sense, and French with an immigrant background,” analyzes Ludovic Boukherma for AFP.
“We don’t leave our social class and we are under house arrest but, in these lives, there are joys to be had, first loves in particular,” he continues.
“The film is also a story of class, how as we grow up we realize the social class to which we belong… It's not our generation but it's a bit of the social environment in which we grew up” , declares Zoran Boukherma.
The duo, who have made four films together, today readily describe themselves as “class defectors”, an expression brought up to date by authors such as a certain… Nicolas Mathieu.
