“La Gradiva”, an interview with director Marine Atlan

Marine Atlan, known for her outstanding work as a cinematographer (for instance on “Summer Scars”, “Thunder”, and “The Rapture”), debuts as a director with the fascinating and lively “La Gradiva”, which takes us on a school trip to Pompeii with a group of privileged last year high schoolers led by their passionate Latin teacher (Antonia Buresi), who prompts them to read the traces of the past, to reimagine the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, while shaken by their own desires and fantasies and frustrations. The film, also running for the Camera d’Or of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, just won the Grand Prix of the Critics’ Week.

We talk about the idea of having the antique figure of the Gradiva from Wilhelm Jensen‘s novella, famously analysed by Sigmund Freud and later taken to the silver screen by Alain Robbe-Grillet, continue to walk alongside a group of young people of our time, thus adding another layer of history. Marine Atlan explains how she and Anne Brouillet worked on creating a polyphonic script for this ensemble piece, and that she wanted the film to be full of life and embrace both the documentary-like descent into the story of the 2000-year-old ruins and the melodrama coming from the youths as well as the lyricism of certain aspects of the story.

The French director tells us more about using a photo instead of a bas-relief to represent a moment in time captured by an image and the secrets it bears, as well as the need of the character of Tony (Colas Quignard) to recreate a personal, family mythology. We linger on the specific figure of this despondent, young wanderer as opposed to (or as complemented by) that of his seductive best friend James (Mitia Capellier), representing “absolute privilege,” reminiscent of the central character in “Teorema”, on whom many of the participants in the school trip project their fantasies and whom they desire as much as they resent him.

Plot