Marine Atlan's lithe, perceptive, piercingly compassionate debut takes a chattering group of French high-schoolers on a devastatingly poignant trip to Pompeii and makes the coming-of-age genre feel reborn.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Les Films du Poisson, Cannes Critics' Week. At 2 hours 25 minutes, Marine Atlan‘s stunning debut, “La Gradiva,” is long if you run a stopwatch. But by any other measure it is as quick as a breath — a deep, ragged but restorative breath — of seasalty, basalty air. It’s the first sniff of adulthood and the last gasp of childhood for a gaggle of French students, taken on a final-year school trip to Pompeii by a teacher determined to decant some last bit of cultural and historical appreciation into them. The smart kids, the shy ones, the jokers and the loners — every one of them is caught in the pyroclastic flow of adolescence, every minute a negotiation between fitting in and standing out. Seismically sensitive and deeply moving, Atlan’s film is simply one of the most piercingly accurate and immersive portrayals ever, of that fleeting moment when — not really a kid but still, really, a kid — you are simultaneously the most forcibly socialized and possibly the loneliest you will ever be.
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