August 1992, in the deindustrialized East of France. Anthony, 14, drags his boredom with his cousin and takes a canoe to reach a lake beach. This son of poor people falls in love with a middle-class girl with a ponytail, Stéph', who invites him to a party. It is the discovery of a world of privileged people which the teenager will only stumble upon, just like his best enemy, Hacine, the child of immigrants. Until one evening of the semi-final of the Football World Cup, in 1998, when the inequalities seemed to be forgotten.
It's never easy to transpose a literary work to the screen. By tackling Their children after them, magnificent novel on adolescence, social determinism, Prix Goncourt in 2018, Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma were eagerly awaited. The thirty-year-old twins (Teddy, The year of the shark) respect the division of the book into four chapters. However, they deliver a less harsh vision, focusing more on the hero's love story than on the social dimension of Nicolas Mathieu's work. They even aestheticize the rusty blast furnaces and the suburban housing estate which imprisons the protagonists a little too much.
What remains is a fairly accurate transcription of the boredom and wanderings of adolescence. And the casting. At 22 years old, Paul Kircher is probably here for the last time as a teenager. As Anthony, right eye half-closed under greasy hair, he is less magnetic than as the wolf boy of Animal kingdom, Thomas Cailley, but his interpretation earned him the Best Newcomer Award at the Venice Film Festival. In the roles of her mother and Hacine, Ludivine Sagnier and Sayyid El Alami are very true. Gilles Lellouche, as an alcoholic and sanguine father, incapable of communicating, is particularly touching.
2 h 21.
France
