30/05/2023 - Robin Campillo puts decolonisation through a very subtle sieve in a film about a family and the French military presence in Madagascar

"We want to remain worthy of our great elders, those of Algeria, Indochina and African Chad. Heirs to so much glory, our flags are heavy with history." Slipped in almost anecdotally at the heart of Red Island [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the new feature film by Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys [+see also:
trailer
interview: Robin Campillo
film profile], BPM (Beats Per Minute) [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Arnaud Valois
interview: Robin Campillo
film profile]), released tomorrow in French cinemas by Memento Distribution, this song by the 8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment says a lot about the very fine picture of decolonisation painted by the director through a multitude of small sensory touches. Rather than tackle the subject head-on by plunging into Madagascar in the early 1970s, a decade or so after the island's independence, the director chose to collect snippets of military and personal memory, patching them together and stitching them together to create an original, refined structure based on the eyes of an eight-year-old child, stealthily observing his environment and capturing fragments of reality with a sensitivity heightened by imagination.

"You've just landed in the most beautiful place in the world, base 181, the place of all pleasures, a real little Gallic village, a family..." Warrant Officer Robert Lopez (Spaniard Quim Gutiérrez), his wife Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and their friends the Guedjs (Sophie Guillemin and David Serero) have prepared a festive lunch in the sunshine to welcome Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière) who has just been transferred from France. This is a French air force base where everyone lives within the military compound: there's the swimming pool, the forensic centre, the church, the officers' mess, the school, the beach and the surrounding jungle. Garrison life in a little jewel case of earthly paradise, as if cut off from the world, where people invite each other in to kill time, where they dance in the heat, but where cracks also surface underground, those of couples and those of a twilight nostalgia for the colonial grip. The youngest of the three Lopez sons, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), picks up on these fragmentary clues. He loves nothing more than to hide (under the table, in a crate, in the vegetation) and spy on the world of adults ("watching the moments when you think you're alone or when you don't want to be watched"), interweaving his perceptions with his imagination nourished by reading the Fantômette novels. And it's all much more complex than it seems...

Weaving a highly sophisticated film that works on the unspeakable, Robin Campillo weaves a tale with two sides and two echoes, gradually bringing out a portrait of a cracking couple, a very precise picture of the indolent daily life of expatriates in their bubble of happiness, a distillation of the atmosphere between nostalgia and geostrategy of the post-colonial French military presence. Extremely rich in suggestive detail and beautifully wrapped up by Jeanne Lapoirie's cinematography and Arnaud Rebotini's music, the film perfectly recreates the padded, enveloping atmosphere of the lost paradise of the French colonialists, but also that of a childhood whose conscience is awakening to the ambiguities of a world that is far less simple and idyllic than it appears. A world of white people whose point of view is abruptly reversed in Red Island, bringing to a close a film that is very bold in its intention of masked intelligence and very successful in its approach to the perception of the imperceptible.

Red Island was produced by Les Films de Pierre and co-produced by France 3 Cinéma, Memento Films Production, DDC Madagascar, Belgium's Scope Pictures and Playtime, which handles international sales.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)

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Photogallery 28/09/2023: San Sebastián 2023 - Red Island

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