After a fantastic film in 2020, Teddythen a comedy, The Year of the Shark, in 2022, Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma are experimenting with this third feature film with a perilous exercise by embarking on the film adaptation of the 2018 Goncourt Prize, signed Nicolas Mathieu. Their children after them, presented at the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Paul Kircher the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Revelation, will be released in theaters on Wednesday December 4, 2024.
1992. Anthony (the dazzling Paul Kircher), a 14-year-old teenager, lives in an industrial valley in crisis in eastern France. Summer drags on in boredom. One day like any other, with his cousin and usual idle companion (the excellent Louis Memmi), they decide to go for a walk at the lake, on the “Culs nus” beach. And it is there, on a wooden pontoon in the middle of the water, that Anthony sees Stéphanie for the first time (Angelina Woreth)a young girl from a neighboring town, from a wealthier background than him. It's love at first sight. This event will lead to others, which will lastingly mark the beginning of his adult life.
Like the book, the film version of Their children after them plunges us into the 1990s and the social misery of a region once a flagship of the steel industry, already devastated for a good decade. The film focuses on the new generation, that of the children of those who have suffered the full brunt of deindustrialization, unemployment, the indignity of having lost their job. Alcohol and family violence are the most visible consequences.
The questions of virility, masculinity and humiliation are skillfully staged in the war between Anthony and Hacine against the backdrop of motorcycle theft, marking in passing a social hierarchy which is expressed within the very class of the most deprived. This is the most successful part of the film. Below the downgraded worker, there is the son of an immigrant who, in addition to being poor, is not from here. All these men share humiliation, which takes different forms here, but always produces the same effects.
What horizon for “their children after them”? What can these adolescents hope for growing up with the spectacle of their lost parents before their eyes? How to escape your destiny? This is what the novelist Nicolas Mathieu questioned in his novel, and which the film attempts to stage in natural settings filmed like in a western, with a carefully chosen cast.
Paul Kircher, Angelina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami or Louis Memmi first and foremost, but also all those around them, accurately embody an overflowing adolescence and the heightened desires and feelings that accompany it. Anthony's parents, played with intensity by Gilles Lellouche and Ludivine Sagnier, speak of the violence, the despair, and the lack of words of men to express their feelings, and the courage of women to make what can still stand up. be. The hits of the 1990s, as in the book, punctuate and illuminate the key moments of the narration.
But a scenario following the exact plot of the book and making almost no dead ends, the film drags on. The staging, which accumulates rehashed visual effects on this type of subject, gets bogged down in an aesthetic of nostalgia – tracking shots on motorcycles and saturated images, which too often take precedence over the truth of the characters.
By wanting to say too much, this ambitious adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu's novel ends up stifling emotion, failing through excess generosity to translate the writer's rich and lively prose into cinematic language. Thus, we remain on the surface of this subtle and committed text, often funny (an aspect almost completely erased here), which depicts both the fury of adolescent life and the abandonment of industrial lands abandoned to unemployment against a backdrop of class struggle and social determinism.
Genre : Drama
Director: Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma
Actors: Paul Kircher, Angelina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
Pays : France
Duration : 2h16
Sortie : December 4, 2024
Distributer : Warner Bros France
Synopsis : August 1992. A lost valley in the East, blast furnaces that no longer burn. Anthony, 14, is bored. One hot afternoon at the lake, he meets Stéphanie. The love at first sight is such that that same evening, he secretly borrows his father's motorbike 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.
