The lives of teenagers in cinema are usually written by adults. Everyone has been through that stage of life, yet no adult experiences society, the contemporary moment, at that age. And in a context where the pace of social change is constantly accelerating, such an undertaking carries considerable risks, as it may produce something ranging from useless to ridiculous. Sometimes, filmmakers choose to portray adolescence in another era, either with a nostalgic tone or with the intention of capturing the truth about how their own generation was shaped. At other times, they place adolescence opposite themselves, focusing primarily on the role of the adults who have to confront it. And sometimes, in a far more vulgar manner, they assume the role of the teacher — at which point the result is likely to become repulsive.
Yet adolescence, and particularly the high-school environment, which serves as a breeding ground for social relationships, can become a laboratory for their analysis. There, the entire personal history of the characters that remains unknown to us is absent, and the data contain less “noise”, allowing the sincerity of thoughts that are only beginning to take shape, and have not yet been battered by the acceptance of social conventions, to emerge. The period during which human beings position themselves within society is not a momentary event, but a process of development. And if one examines that development with the necessary care, there is much to be found that can describe the truth of the society awaiting these young people.
The adult spectator, on the other hand, cannot afford to be naive — cannot, in other words, forget that the cinematic work is the creation of another adult. What the spectator can do, however, is focus on the intensity with which the adolescent voice is allowed to resonate within the artistic work. And this is perhaps the most important aspect of Marine Atlan’s cinematic narrative technique: in her first film, La Gradiva, she never allows the adolescent voice to fall silent.
In my opinion, the most characteristic scene illustrating this technique is the one at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, where the voice of the teacher, Mercier, does not drown out the conversations, comments, or even the disputes between the students, which constitute the reality of their social relationships. An apparently calm scene ends in an explosion, as almost every scene in the film does, following a pattern that accompanies adolescent behaviour. From a narrative perspective, it is particularly interesting that the direction has already foreshadowed this mechanism through the first outdoor lesson on the mechanics of the lithosphere, connected to the existence of the volcano, just a short distance from the crater of Mount Vesuvius.
But by zooming in on the psychology and concerns of teenagers, has Atlan captured the pulse of her time, or is this merely an extended portrait of youth? The inclusion of conversations between students who have political positions and are capable of engaging in sharp debate — about Parcoursup (the recently introduced system of admission to French higher education), the condition of educational infrastructure, and the working conditions of public-sector employees, particularly in education — may have amounted to a general political commentary when the film premiered at Cannes in May 2026. Yet when it reached cinemas in October of the same year, the whole of France was shaken by precisely those same social questions. This is no coincidence. It demonstrates the filmmaker’s ability to address the major issues of her time, rather than merely philosophising in the abstract through detached and seemingly erudite commentary on social relationships and processes.
The role of the adult, and the burden of providing a figure with whom the spectator can identify, is masterfully taken on by Antonia Buresi, who carries the full weight of her own life — a weight that, naturally, is a nonexistent quantity for the teenagers she accompanies. The new generations arriving to claim their future do not waste their time trying to understand the dead ends reached by those who came before them — and they are probably right not to. The teacher, Mercier (Antonia Buresi), does not place her own problems above her responsibility to accompany the teenagers through their educational experience and their anxieties. She comes so close to them that, as the plot unfolds, the spectator may begin to believe she is about to collapse, paying the price for her inability to balance her own life. Yet the screenplay avoids falling into such a misstep — one that would perhaps have been unnecessary and would have redirected the focus of the film’s content.
The climax of the drama, the result of the criminal distortion of the world we know when presenting it to the generations trying to discover it, demonstrates that lying about the very nature of the world we live in cannot protect the younger generations. Confronting the truth and seeing the certainties we have presented to them collapse can be not only traumatic, but also fatal, for all of them or for some. The lack of trust in teenagers’ ability to live in the world through their own understanding and insight does not merely have criminal consequences; it is perhaps the crime itself. The future is a silence, before the next words that this generation will write into the world it is now making its own.
