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Robin Campillo resorts to the force of suggestion to draw life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through the gaze of a young white man.
By Manohla Dargis
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The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname “Big Red Island” comes from the rich iron content of its soil. The drama “L’Île Rouge,” about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s, suggests that a fair amount of blood seeped into the land, too. The boy is only 10 years old, but he understands more than other young people because his stories are filtered through the life of French filmmaker Robin Campillo.
The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet-eyed and saucer-eyed), lives in a large, airy area with plenty of space and a red-earth garden. There, huddled in a corner, he locks himself in a giant wooden box and reads comics. books starring Ghost, a brave superheroine whose adventures come to life in her imagination. When he’s not immersed in his comics, Thomas rides his bike, gets into innocent trouble, and observes his modest world, especially its inhabitants. his mother, a local spouse, Colette (a very intelligent Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutierrez), an army officer.
A drama about a boy, his family, a social environment, his home and the world in general, “Red Island” is by turns seductive and sensual, and frustratingly elliptical, with a design reminiscent of matryoshka dolls, the colorful . Nest figures from other times. Sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces those intertwining elements very well; It is their integration that is proving difficult. As befits his autobiographical theme, Thomas’s global vision stands out, a limited merit that is manifested in the drawer in which he hides. These limitations are also evident in the clumsiness with which Campillo attempts to do justice to the story and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story begins. There’s a dreamy innocence to Thomas that never corresponds to the film’s older, adult context.
“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist doesn’t think of many things despite the fact that everything around him changes. We feel that Thomas’ family life will soon take a turn given the naturalistic conversations he hears and some of the tense scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the excellent drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a knack for capturing the charged power and friction that a room full of other people can produce when they come together. closely. Here, when drunken officials and their wives dance in the circle of relatives at home, bodies together, the circuit of longing and green looks of envy is electric.
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