“Their children after them”, a dive into peripheral France in the 1990s

Boredom and the first emotions of a teenager in the 1990s. Faithful adaptation of the 2018 Goncourt Prize, Their children after them releases this Wednesday in theaters. The film depicts the destiny of teenagers in a town in Lorraine hit by deindustrialization, and the impossible love story between a worker's kid and the daughter of a notable. For actor Gilles Lellouche, who plays the role of Anthony's father, a “son of a pro” who dreams of love played by Paul Kichner, “it is also the story of people who are exhausted by life, whose backs are a little bent, their ideals a little flouted“.

In his book, sold more than 700,000 copies, Nicolas Mathieu paints the portrait of a peripheral France often forgotten and of its youth dreaming of elsewhere but condemned to reproduce the path of their parents. The author was inspired by his own adolescence. “My idea was to tell the story of the little lives that burn in the summer in the shadow of the blast furnaces which have gone out“, says the 52-year-old writer in the TF1 report above. A story in which the young directors, Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma, who grew up in the countryside, in a working-class family, recognized themselves.

Quite long (2h26), Their children after them was originally conceived as a series, and remains constructed in chapters, like the book, like so many summers and losses of illusions. They are punctuated by a soundtrack in the form of a Proust madeleine for those who turned 15 in the 1990s, from a cover of Nirvana to Florent Pagny and Francis Cabrel, via Bruce Springsteen.

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It is on this soundtrack that the trajectory of these young people is constructed, from Steph, Anthony's inaccessible love played by Angelina Woreth, to Hacine, the enemy brother from the neighboring city, raised alone by his immigrant father from Morocco, and performed by Sayyid El Alami. The film, with its sometimes American aesthetic, hides nothing from French fractures, but also celebrates moments of communion, including the summer of 1998 and “black-white-beur” France vibrating for the World Cup. Or when peripheral France becomes a cinema landscape.