There is the faint sound of a callback to Francois Truffaut in Venice Film Festival competition title And Their Children After Them (Leurs Enfants Après Eux), a sunlit story of three teenagers set in a moribund French steel town in the 1990s. Check, for example, those fundamental French subjects: first love and sexual awakening, nature and the spontaneity of youth, the consuming love of family and corresponding desire to break free. It is an echo that grows fainter by the minute, however, as that lightness of touch is weighed down by a repetitive narrative and the charmlessness of its central characters.
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Gormless working-class boy Anthony (Paul Kircher) pursues Steph (Angelina Woreth), a pretty girl from a couple of yards the other side of the tracks, from one summer to the next. They meet first at the picturesque local lake, where Anthony has just stolen a canoe along with his cousin (Louis Memmi). That night, they all meet up again at a party where Anthony clashes with sleek gatecrasher Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), an encounter that will develop into a feud running in parallel with his unfulfilled yearning for Steph.
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Directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, who have adapted the film from a bildungsroman by Nicolas Mathieu, are actually declared enthusiasts for American cinema, citing a kinship with coming-of-age films from Hollywood rather than the New Wave. The soundtrack reflects that allegiance, for sure, with numerous needle drops from the ‘90s directly picking up on story elements and a sprinkling of heritage numbers: Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” act as bookends.
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As those tracks suggest, there is also an emphasis in the film on urgent movement that is definitely American in feel, if not in detail. “Run to the Hills” accompanies a rush by two boys on their bicycles to the local nudist beach in the first of four summers that form the film’s chapters, while the Springsteen anthem ends with a roar a story in which the smoking gun is always a motorbike. The enduring association of motorbikes and freedom is never lost on us or, indeed, on the kids in the dead-end town beyond the lake.
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It is Anthony’s decision to sneak out to a party with his cousin on his father’s old bike, which sits in the garage unused but still treasured, that drives the drama. Anthony is only 14; he hardly knows what he’s doing when has a scuffle with Hacine, at the party who gets his revenge by stealing the bike where Anthony parked it. The boys’ attempts to recover it, before the search is taken over by his stoically determined mother, plunge them into the charged atmosphere of their region’s racial divide. The Arab boys’ gangs are hostile; the white thug who offers them a gun to deal with the issue is truly terrifying.
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Anthony’s transgression with the bike also pops the plug on a lifetime of fury stored in his father’s bullish frame, destroying the perilous balance within his home. The family dynamics work powerfully, thanks to the superb performances by supporting characters. Ludivine Sagnier, has emerged from her kittenish roles as a young woman to play this blue-collar mom with tremendous warmth, savvy and toughness. Gilles Lellouche brings a terrifyingly dark energy to Anthony’s drunken father who, like most of the men in town, lost his job a decade ago when the steel industry collapsed. The town’s old blast furnace remains as a ruin dominating the skyline; in this story it serves as meeting point, monument and memento mori.
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There is always a sense here of something lost. Social commentary is not the purpose of this film, but it makes a stronger impression than Anthony’s wisps of lust for the girl to whom he can barely muster anything to say beyond “you’re pretty.” It also informs the consciousness of class that pulses beneath the characters’ aspirations. Steph comes from a family better off than Anthony’s, but feels the chill of inferiority at university where, she says, her contemporaries “were studying before they were born.” Hacine is brighter than she is – we see a glimpse of the austere literary paperbacks on his desk when he is just a boy – but his color is against him; he returns from Morocco with a better way to make money than he is going to find at the toothless local labor exchange.
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The Boukherma brothers’ last film was also set in a small town, but was a genre film involving body transformation. And Their Children After Them takes them into the verdant territory of literary romance, which weighs heavily on the long, repetitive result; however much of the original novel has been excised, the end result feels overstuffed, as if everything had to be included.
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It also feels old-fashioned, even for a film that blasts off with Iron Maiden. Steph’s impenetrable otherness, as an object of desire whose own wants are never examined, seems to belong to another era. Anthony is a bit like Chaplin’s tramp, still the harmless dope after four years that he was when he cut his hand stealing a canoe. As the fireworks explode for Bastille Day in the last of their four summers, there is the wistful sense only that life will go on in much the same way it always has.
Title:And Their Children After Them
Festival:Venice(Competition)
Directors-Screenwriters: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma
Cast:Paul Kircher, Angélina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
Sales agent:Charades
Running time:2 hrs 24 mins
