France, 1986. Stella, Adèle, Victor and Frank are in the prime of their explosive youth. For them, acting is everything and they dream of becoming actors. Entering the prestigious theater school of Les Amandiers – created by Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans in Nanterre – they feel they have the world in their hands. Launched at full speed in their passions, they will live together and intensely everything that this new “group” life can reserve for them: enthusiasm, fears, jealousies, opportunities (their first staging of Chekhov) , travel (there is also one to the legendary Actors Studio in New York), promiscuity, love affairs, but also pain, a sense of loneliness, the tragedy of existence (with drugs and AIDS) which they even come knocking on their door. The protagonists of «Forever Young – Les amandiers», the latest film by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, already in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, have in them all the contradictions of a free and capricious, self-centered and unresolved youth, continually put to the test by a destiny that seems to have come too soon for everyone.
Bruni Tedeschi cloaks this story in ill-concealed biographism (she was herself a student of Les Amandiers in the 1980s), attempting an operation à la Nouvelle vague and looking with affection at these ghosts of her own memory, which come to life in front of her mobile camera and syncopated, in an attempt to grasp its more epidermal, physical and sensual character. The film thus flows like a flooded river, with a glowing rhythm, with the aim of restoring that sense of continuous movement and precarious instability that distinguishes the life of a group of young actors for whom the future is written in every moment of the present . Although sincere and engaging, «Forever Young – Les amandiers» appears too overloaded, excessively “screamed” (the first scene is an involuntary mise en abyme), also failing to shake off that patina of complacency that it is perhaps its most obvious limitation.
Director: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi; Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Sofiane Bennacer, Louis Garrel, Micha Lescot; Screenplay: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky, Agnès de Sacy; Photography: Joulien Poupard; Editing: Anne Weil; Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay; Distribution: Lucky Red. France-Italy, 2022, 126′.
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December 2, 2022 | 4:10pm
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