Maybe it’s a product of being a father of three myself, but I often find that my assignments at film festivals tend to stories of teenagers. It could also be that the coming-of-age drama is a standard of the indie movement, no matter its country of origin. Three films from this year’s Cannes are distinct in tone and setting, but all feature troubled young people trying to solve both day-to-day problems and the bigger questions they’re about to face in adulthood.
The best of the three is Manuela Martelli’s “The Meltdown,” a drama that borders on being a thriller but eschews procedural mystery elements in favor of consistent mood. It’s a well-made film that feels a bit narratively thin, but that almost feels intentional. After all, it’s a film about confused emotions and how easy it is for something or someone to get lost in the night. So it should kind of slip through your fingers. Martelli is clearly a talented filmmaker, and her work here marks her as someone to watch going forward.
“The Meltdown” unfolds in an Andean ski resort in Chili in 1992. Nine-year-old Ines (Maya O’Rourke) is staying there with her grandparents, watching the bigger kids ski gracefully up and down the mountain. She’s particularly taken with the 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae), who it seems like she kind of looks up to like a big sister. Hanna’s beauty has drawn the attention of the older men around her, giving the early scenes of “The Meltdown” a sense of predatory dread.
When Hanna literally disappears one night, fingers point at a boy she had been talking to or possibly even her tough instructor. Her mother Lina (an excellent Saskia Rosendahl) comes to the region to join in the search and Martelli maintains a delicate tone that’s closer to confusion than procedural. Part of this is maintained by how much we see through Ines’ eyes, a girl who just wants her friend back more than anything else.
It’s worth noting that Chile in 1992 was just coming off the Pinochet regime, which specialized in disappearances, and that the film directly references an event in April of that year when an iceberg was transported from Antarctica to the Universal Exposition of Seville, apparently seen as a sign of a new Chile. Part of Martelli’s drama seems to be asking exactly what has changed when 15-year-old girls can simply vanish?
It’s a bit too long and could have used a bit more depth in its supporting characters, but, again, those elements feel entwined in the attempt to tell this story through the innocent eyes of a child, a time when people often learn how dangerous the world can be.
The protagonists of Julien Gasper-Oliveri’s “La Frappe (The Blow)” had to learn that truth about danger far too young, and at home. The dilemma at the center of Gasper-Oliveri’s film is an impossible one for 19-year-old Enzo Comini (Diego Murgia), whose father Anthony (Bastien Bouillon) is being released from prison as the film opens. While the script is purposefully vague for much of its runtime as to the details of Enzo’s childhood with Anthony, we know it was bad; so bad that Enzo’s sister Carla (Romane Fringeli) refuses to have anything to do with him and is furious that his brother has chosen the opposite approach. Enzo gets stuck in the middle, pulled between a loving sister and an abusive parent. On paper, that might sound like an easy choice for adults who have been to therapy, but teenagers, especially those stunted in their development by trauma, will often do anything to keep a parent in their life, even forgiving the unforgivable.
Gaspar-Oliveri has a deep well of effective sympathy for Enzo, often moving his camera in close on his emotional face or even tracking his body in the film’s opening shot. He returns multiple times to images of Enzo and/or Carla sleeping, almost as if this is one of the only times they can find peace. As a writer, he withholds a bit too long regarding the depth of Anthony’s abuse, but that’s almost in keeping with the film’s POV in that Enzo himself doesn’t want to think or talk about what happened as he tries so heartbreakingly hard to move forward. That we know this is impossible gives the film an oppressive tension as we wait for Enzo’s new reality to be destroyed by his old one.
As it approaches its final act, “La Frappe” hits a few too many of the same beats repeatedly, making emotional and narrative points more times than it needs to. It feels like a drama that spins its wheels a few times before finding the road again, but it usually does through a nuanced choice by Murgia or Fringeli. These are talented young performers who disappear into the characters, giving the production an echo of another Cannes favorite: the Dardennes brothers. Like those verité masters, we often forget the artifice of filmmaking here, simply watching two young people fight something they can’t defeat: their own past.
Artifice is what fractures and sinks Katharina Rivilis’ frustrating “I’ll Be Gone in June.” A strong central performance from newcomer Naomi Cosma gets lost in a clunky screenplay that often feels written by someone who has never even been to the United States. With a producer credit by the great Wim Wenders, one can expect a little cultural dissonance, but there’s a difference between his masterful studies of the U.S. and this fantasy version of 2001 New Mexico, something someone in Germany might imagine instead of something that actually happened or a place that actually existed. Rivilis leans on so many clichés about the U.S. from religion to patriotism to guns, and that’s before she drops 9/11 into her screenplay.
Cosma plays Franny, a German teenager who comes to live with a family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From the beginning, her host family registers as pretty awful (and unbelievable due to clunky line readings). Mom doesn’t give her a ride home from school because she’s a few minutes late and won’t let her eat a second apple because they can’t afford it. The vision of an awful American host family doesn’t ring true, but the screenplay sinks even further when Rivilis chooses to inject 9/11 into the narrative, showing clips on TVs that look much older than 2001 and forcing awkward conversations about war and patriotism into the mouths of teenagers, most of whom become screenwriter mouthpieces instead of real people.
Against this backdrop, Franny begins a tentative relationship with a moody loner musician named Elliott (David Flores), who also walked right out of Clichéd American Teen 101. Elliott is so boring that one can’t figure out what Franny, who, thanks to Cosma’s heavy lifting, is pretty charming, smart, and funny, would see in him. Is Rivilis commenting on the shallow vapidity of the American experience in 2001? If so, that element isn’t refined enough.
The worst sin of “I’ll Be Gone in June” is its dialogue, which all sounds like the product of a German writer instead of the way that young people actually acted in the Southwest at the turn of the millennium. With the exception of a handful of beats, almost everyone and everything in “I’ll Be Gone in June” feels like a screenwriter’s product instead of something real. It has no weight in the real world.
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