Victor DupuyNovember 26, 2024
Inspired by its director's experience as a teacher, Teddy Lussi-Modeste's third film paints an uncompromising portrait of national education. No Waves indeed resonates with certain dramatic events of recent years, and this is perhaps what explains its success.
A teacher in the sauce
It's a film with a highly flammable plot. Co-written with Audrey Diwan (the award-winning director of L'ÉVÈNEMENT in 2021), PAS DE VAGUES features a young, slightly idealistic French teacher who is wrongly accused of harassing one of his students. Obviously, it didn't take that much for the situation to flare up.
The teacher in question (played by François Civil) has all the difficulty in the world to face this situation in front of his class, especially since the brother of the young girl in question reacts a little uncontrollably, and the headteacher doesn't show much support. As for the colleagues in the teachers’ room, their solidarity is also put to the test.
An exploration of gray areas
You may have understood, NO WAVES first tells the story of the abandonment of a teacher by an entire educational community, a deplorable story unfortunately inspired by reality, since the director Teddy Lussi-Modeste used a personal experience lived to write his screenplay.
The latter also echoes the assassinations of Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard, which highlighted the loneliness of teachers in the face of the extremely serious threats weighing on the school. But NO WAVES also keeps a good distance from certain caricatured debates and prefers to explore the gray areas of its characters.
Here, responsibilities are shared, including by the slandered teacher, who made the mistake of allowing himself certain familiarities with the students, which opened the door to very real harassment: his own.
François Civil superstar
Because the film also highlights the homophobia that can still reign in schools today, since the character played by François Civil does everything to hide his homosexuality from his students, one of whom is played by Mallory Wanecquethe revelation of LIKE A PRINCE (Ali Marhyar, 2023).
We also find there a decidedly omnipresent Agnès Hurstel after her visits to Quentin Dupieuxbut the attraction of PAS DE VAGUES is obviously François Civil, who is currently shining in theaters with L'AMOUR OUF (Gilles Lellouche). The new darling of French cinema makes a charming teacher, and don't count on us to complain if he's in almost every shot in Teddy Lussi-Modeste's film.
NO WAVES, available on CANAL+.
