The only time of year that I feel like my profession is as a writer rather than, say, some combination of bartending and hobbies, is at the start of fall, as summer gives way to light rain and fog and I head up to New York for nearly two weeks of press & industry screenings before NYFF and then train back to Baltimore in time for New/Next Film Festival. In my search to be thorough with both, I’m grateful that there’s a small amount of overlap. This year, that manifested in the pair of 1-2 Special disturbed films Everytime and La Gradiva. It was not so regrettable that I had to miss the former (even though I was assured by many that went that it was one of the best films of the festival), given that I had the opportunity to see it barely two weeks later at New/Next in Baltimore. Moreover, I was able to cross La Gradiva off my list for both fests early on, seeing it in my second or third day up in NYC—an early highlight to a largely disappointing lineup.
Marine Atlan’s film is a delicate and deceptively simple film about teenagers, following a class of French students as they travel to Naples. Atlan channels Rossellini and Rivette while simultaneously creating a mise-en-scène all her own, shuffling bodies around in a way that’s spontaneous rather than calculated. Part of this expertise, no doubt, comes from Atlan’s experience as a cinematographer. But it would bely Atlan’s ability to pretend that La Gradiva is a directorial effort that came completely out of the blue. Her talents as a director are even more on display in her medium-length film from 2018, Daniel.
Running just barely under an hour, Daniel follows the titular French tween (Théo Polgar) as he and his classmates teeter between childish naivety and adulthood—in this case, on the day of Atlan’s short feature, this falls towards the latter. What makes Daniel so extraordinary is how it so tenderly and tragically maintains the balance between these phases of life, dancing in the ineffable center.
After Daniel is released by the school nurse, he wanders around the school’s snowy courtyard, in a suddenly surreal scene of quiet courtyards and empty hallways; while he’s wandering, his class is preparing for their dance class. Daniel opens a door to find one of his classmates, Marthe (Madeleine Folacci), as she’s getting dressed. His curiosity leads him closer, until she notices him, immediately feeling violated by Daniel in a situation that the two of them are too young to understand the nascent sexuality of.
Atlan presents this all without dialogue, constructing her interactions through passing looks. That’s not to say that she refuses scripted conversation—it’s featured plenty in the film, in part as the texture of Atlan’s cinematic realism—but the director’s most astounding sequences are when the talking stops. For instance, after Daniel and Marthe’s encounter, the dance that becomes substantially more charged, with every movement of their bodies taking new meaning, with their newfound discomfort with themselves and each other—created by a realization that they’re people that watch and are watched—hanging like a cloud over the room.
There’s one final turn to Daniel—which I won’t reveal here—that lands all of the children in a total void, where all they have is their own thoughts; they lie on the ground knowing, perhaps for the first time, that nothing in their lives will ever be the same. This, to me, is Atlan’s specialty: the perfect articulation of the moments where we suddenly become aware, where they know that they’re not children anymore and never will be again.