14/02/2012

Atomic Age [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Héléna Klotz
film profile], Héléna Klotz’s first 67-minute feature film, was presented at Angers’ Festival Premiers Plans before being invited to the Panorama section at the 62nd Berlin Film Festival. Atomic Age is the asmospheric tale of two young souls adrift during a single night, a journey set to electro beats that starts with a promising night out in Paris and ends at dawn in the woods with the image of two inseparable souls walking each on their own side in an unknown direction.

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The cheeky and talkative Victor (Eliott Paquet) and the more silent and protective Rainer (Dominik Wojcik), half young Werther and half Fassbinder figure (as the director’s imagery partially takes root in the 1980s) are at first happy to be together and excited about what is to come. But even from the beginning, a certain melancholy worry already colours their dialogues, recited a little mechanically like theatre monologues in a sort of Beckettian tale for adolecents. After a few swigs of the cheap alcohol stuffed in their pockets to set the mood, they enter a nightclub where Victor looks for the girl that he has fantasised about who will be waiting for him without knowing it, but the trance does not last long as soon our two heroes are back in the street. There, Victor fights with both a rich and aggressif snob with angelical blond curly hair played by Niels Schneider (the Adonis in Heartbeats by Xavier Dolan) and a bouncer to whom they say that they know they are going to die.

As the Eiffel Tower sweeps circles of light over Paris, it appears like a menacing watch tower and the city becomes an increasingly hostile place for the boys. They start to expresss their anxieties and regrets as if their life was over and they were on borrowed time (“I’m suffocating,” says the laconic Rainer, insomniac and a poet), as the ambiguous homo-erotic link between them that appears in the beginning of the film continues to strengthen. From one shady place to the next, our heroes, still children, attempt in vain to find themselves and end up getting lost as they leave the city. “We have to return to the night,” says Rainer. Klotz definitely chooses to keep her audience in the shadows in this suspense film whose strange ending might perhaps also be a new beginning.

(Translated from French)