Marine Atlan's 'La Gradiva' Review: A Major Debut Arrives — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Marine Atlan's debut feature "La Gradiva" runs 2 hours 25 minutes and follows French high-schoolers on a final-year trip to Pompeii with their Latin teacher, Mme Mercier (Antonia Buresi).
- Toni (Colas Quignard), James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), and Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin) anchor the ensemble, with the reviewer calling all three performances "astoundingly natural."
- Atlan co-wrote the screenplay with Anne Brouillet and served as co-cinematographer alongside Pierre Mazoyer, with the review crediting a summer-Europop soundtrack and deft group-scene blocking.
- The screenplay is described as unusually alert to inherited social-class divisions among the students, surfacing in dinner-table political arguments and the students' competing romantic ambitions.
- Toni's gayness is handled without making it the central drama: classmates accept it with what the reviewer calls "Gen-Z disinterest," while his obsession with Neapolitan origins serves as his sole claim to glamour against an unenviable family background.
- Suzanne delivers what the reviewer calls one of the film's most devastating lines when she tells her roommates that some women, like her, "have to be unfuckable for others to be fuckable."
- Vesuvius looms throughout as a volcanic metaphor, but the reviewer credits Atlan with keeping the symbolism from overwhelming the film's "life and vigor."
Why it matters: For Marine Atlan, a debut this fully realized — at 2 hours 25 minutes and sustained across an ensemble of largely unknown young performers — establishes her as a significant new directorial voice in French cinema and signals that festival programmers and arthouse distributors should pay close attention to her next project.
Ask SkimNews
