Summer 92, in the East of France. While relaxing by a lake with his best friend, fourteen-year-old Anthony falls under the spell of Stéphanie, who is two years older than him. The same evening, he sneakily borrows his father's motorbike to go to a party where she has invited him. The disappearance of the machine in the early morning will have serious consequences on the future of his family and that of a certain Hacine…
Anthony, dreamer and unconscious, suffers from situations more than he controls them. He is as if powerless in the face of the various forms of violence with which he is confronted, that of the impulses of the heart, that which reigns within his home or that which a young North African he meets during this fateful evening feels towards him and who begins to hate him because of a gesture that could have remained innocuous.
Poverty, racism, alcoholism…
The story addresses strong issues: the impoverishment of regions victims of forced deindustrialization, male toxicity, the difficult emancipation of women, the ravages of alcoholism or racism, especially when it is insidious and eats away at 'interior. Paul Kircher (“The High School Boy” and “The Animal Kingdom”), awarded in Venice for his role, accompanies this sentimental and social education with a gentleness which will contrast with the tragedies that he will have to face with his frail shoulders, trying to not lose your humanity. We patiently see him grow from the age of fourteen to eighteen, the story focusing on three summers, two years apart each time.
Airs from “L’Amour ouf”
Gilles Lellouche should have directed this film, but he gave up to shoot “L'Amour ouf”, without abandoning the producers. He suggested the name of the Boukherma brothers (“The Year of the Shark”) and plays Anthony's father. He delivers a painful composition, making people live with unexpected dejection and a self-destructive attitude. He hurts others and especially himself. Ludivine Sagnier escapes from their marriage, where there is no more love. She regains her taste for life by running wild. The young antagonist Sayyid El Alami is of rare intensity in the expression of a visceral rage which will explode in a scene of terrifying aggression. His anger is not gratuitous, it is based on a feeling of injustice experienced as the son of an immigrant rejected because of his skin color, without it being direct, making the fight unequal.
This initiatory story with its beautiful romantic scope is like a cousin of “L'Amour ouf” in its themes, its youthful breath and its original soundtrack with the false air of Proust's Madeleines.
Dramatic comedy by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, with Paul Kircher, Angelina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche and Ludivine Sagnier.
France
