“We’re bored!” » laments Anthony, 14 years old (Paul Kircher), staring at the camera with a lost and insolent look. Three words, no more, then a few seconds of silence. The sequence opens “Their children after them”. This plan, from the outset, harpoons you. Everything is said, or a lot, of the substance of an ordinary adolescence. Boredom, near silence, suppressed anger.
Anthony “gets bored”, yet the surroundings seem idyllic. A sparkling lake in the Vosges valley in July. But this simple, bucolic beauty, he doesn't care, it comes back year after year. A still summer…
Only luxury allowed
With his friend Nath (Louis Memmi), the distraction consists of going to see “the bare-ass beach”. That day, at the water's edge, he sees Stéphanie (Angelina Woreth). Thunderbolt. Stéphanie will become the alpha and omega of his life, the why and the how. They are not at all part of the same environment. Inaccessible Stéphanie… A princess! She is a “bourgeois” daughter, a good student, whose family lives in a pretty villa. His father (Gilles Lellouche) has been an unemployed worker since the closure of the blast furnaces. It's 1992.
One evening, Anthony secretly borrows his father's motorcycle to join a party where he hopes to find Stephanie. The next morning, to my amazement, the motorcycle disappeared. For her father, she was invaluable. The only luxury allowed in a life without horizons. For Anthony, for Stéphanie, for Hacine, a boy who lives in the city and finds himself involved in the affair, everything changes.
From 1992 to 1998
The story faithfully follows the structure of the book by Nicolas Mathieu, Goncourt Prize 2018. The Boukherma brothers tell the story of their youth, from 1992 to 1998, in a valley devastated by deindustrialization. They cut a lot into the sociological depth of the novel, to focus their narration on the love story between Anthony and Stéphanie. They have chosen the romantic, assuming they want to move people.
The staging is effective, direct, full of music. Hits from the 1990s, from Nirvana to NTM, punctuate the soundtrack. We feared the “long suffocating clip” syndrome. But the Boukherma brothers are also very sensitive. They acutely capture the doubts, the fragilities, the love that overflows by not being formulated. They show fathers devastated by unemployment, violent, who love but love badly. A courageous mother, big fan of “Santa Barbara”, formidable warrior when it comes to saving her family (Ludivine Sagnier).
In Nicolas Mathieu's work, Anthony is a peevish little guy. The filmmakers chose, with Paul Kircher, a tall, slender, clumsy guy, weighed down by himself. Their Anthony is a cousin of the teenagers in the films of Gus Van Sant or Larry Clark.
He grows up, achieves happiness, while learning to give up his dreams. Such is still, often, the fate of the sons of workers, the Boukherma brothers remind us, at the end of this incandescent and melancholic fresco.
“Their children after them”, by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma. Duration: 2 hours 16 minutes. Theatrical release on Wednesday, December 4.
