A little UFO in teenage series, Those who blushperformed and directed by Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, looks the malaise of young people straight in the eye. Broadcast this Tuesday on Arte, the miniseries, voted best Short Format series at the Séries Mania Festival in 2024, distances itself from the codes of the usual teen drama to meet today’s high school students, preferring the beauty of the ordinary to the romanticized youth of contemporary teen series.
The fiction of eight ten-minute episodes sets up its camera in a gymnasium where a substitute teacher (Julien Gaspar-Oliver) comes to disrupt the humdrum daily life of a theater workshop. Stunned by the destruction committed on A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare, he shakes up the troop of eleven students stunned by a classic text that they struggle to understand. Through unusual improvisations, he helps them to think outside the box and free themselves from their restraint. The students bump into each other and let the truth of their individual experience express itself.
Far from the opulent villas of Beverly Hills And Newport Beachthe series meets middle-class youth, hardened to the language of the street, both impressionable and prisoners of the social role assigned to them. Eyes are tamed, individualities are freed in a feeling of cohesion. If wounds and flaws appear subtly through tearful exercises, the series avoids falling into the pitfall of caricature in the manner Skins Or Euphoria (as excellent as these two series are) which show a youth adrift and prey to addictions.
A shocking mise en abyme
Halfway between documentary and fiction, the eleven young people were chosen “for their spontaneity and their complementarity”, becoming in turn “the source and the subject of a script written for them, and rewritten during filming, based on collective improvisations”, specifies Arte. “We really witness the first candid steps of these young people in a profession that they want to practice. We improvised on a given situation and that gave me the outline for the next day’s episode”, explains Julien Gaspar-Oliveri.
We witness a moving mise en abyme of actors playing apprentice actors, pure and clumsy, whose raw emotion is expressed as much through the close-ups of their youthful faces as through their fragile gestures. It is difficult not to be carried away by the purity of these young minds, crossed by the hope of a better future. Those who blush watch these young people reveal themselves in letting go. Shame gradually gives way to curiosity, distrust to trust, laziness to envy. The series draws its audience into a nostalgic exploration of their own adolescence and manages to find beauty in the banality of existence. As poignant as it is touching.
