THE STORY – On the French Riviera, perilous cliff-jumping competitions and a budding romance heighten the tensions between two rival gangs of very young children.
THE CAST – Kaylon Lancel, Kelsie Verdeilles, Louise Podolski, Mohamed Coly, Alessandro Piquera & Meryl Pires
THE TEAM – Bruno Dumont (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 91 Minutes
French director/writer Bruno Dumont (“Humanity” and “The Life of Jesus”) has returned to the Cannes Film Festival with a terrific pre-teen drama, “Red Rocks.” Effectively transposing the tropes of teen movies onto its cast of five-year-olds, it is by turns suspenseful, charming, and weirdly romantic. Dumont somehow transforms young feelings and gestures into something that feels profound, creating one of the most emotionally disarming films of his career.
Set over the course of a summer in the French Riviera, the film centers on blond, blue-eyed five-year-old Geo (Kaylon Lancel), who spends his days mini-quad-biking, breaking into cars, and doing perilous cliff-jumps into the sea with his two best friends, Manon (Louise Podolski) and Rouben (Mohamed Coly). However, tensions arise when another gang of three young children – B (Alessandro Piquera), Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), and Do (Meryl Pires) appear on the cliffs, and Geo and B (Alessandro Piquera) attempt to outdo each other by seeing who can jump from the highest point. Things quickly get worse when Geo and Eve begin holding hands and hugging, since Eve is nominally B’s girlfriend and Geo had previously spent his evenings hugging Manon.
The young cast – all of whom were non-professionals, each around five years old at the time of filming – are nothing short of extraordinary, and Dumont’s skill at coaxing such phenomenal performances out of them cannot be overstated. In particular, during what are effectively the film’s romantic scenes, the young actors convey the intensity and agony of teenage romance solely through their stoic facial expressions and hard stares.
What really makes these scenes work is the fact that both the actors – and arguably the characters – are too young to really understand the complexity of their emotional situation, so the audience ends up transposing the adult emotion onto the innocence of the children’s actions. On a similar note, there’s relatively little dialogue, so the looks and gestures – with hugging clearly standing in for kissing – are intensified. As a result, the “romance” scenes are often very funny. One key sequence involves Manon deliberately hugging Geo in front of an increasingly annoyed Eve, who eventually storms over and shouts “STOP HUGGING”, with her hands on her hips. Meanwhile, Eve herself freely admits to Geo that she is “with B” and that their little affair could put Geo in danger.
Performance-wise, it’s really Lancel, Verdeilles, Podolski, and Piquera who do all the impressive acting – Coly gets very little to do, and Pires’ character is barely even named in the script. Of the four, Lancel is the stand-out – he has an odd-looking face and a build that is notably shorter than everyone else, but he has a charisma and an intensity that recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Dumont’s appropriation of teen movie tropes – with a dash of Romeo and Juliet thrown in – pays repeated dividends throughout, whether it’s the way their mini quad bikes stand in for motorbikes (Eve hopping on the back of Geo’s quad bike and driving off with him is an amusingly familiar moment), the comical sight of them breaking into cars when they can barely reach the windows, or the inevitable explosions of violence when the tensions finally come to a head. On the same theme, the cliff-jumping sequences effectively stand in for the car-racing scenes or games of “chicken” in 1950s teen movies. To that end, there is a palpable feeling of suspense in those scenes, as the audience inevitably fears the worst whenever one of the kids leaps from the cliffs (to say nothing of wondering what the health and safety precautions were on set).
The location work is stunning, allowing Dumont to create an acute sense of place, encapsulated by the regular trains that cross the viaduct that towers above the town. This area, and the rocks, are effectively the children’s playground, and it is notably a world in which adults are almost entirely absent – we only ever meet Eve’s mother and grandfather, while the police make the briefest of appearances in order to stop the children cliff-jumping, and they are immediately ignored.
Throughout the film, Dumont conjures a series of gorgeous, sun-drenched images, in collaboration with cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral, who makes the most of the spectacular Riviera scenery, particularly the titular red rocks. Indeed, the colors themselves are breathtaking – an early shot is a beautiful image of the red rocks, the deep blue sea, and bright green foliage against a clear blue sky, reinforcing the idyllic nature of the landscape. The effect is further heightened by the film’s impressive sound design, from the scene-setting of the regular overhead trains to the crashing waves against the rocks, intensifying the sense of danger as the children plunge into the water. There’s also an emphasis on unspoken silence, due to the lack of dialogue, that works well, especially in the film’s most violent scenes.
“Red Rocks” is a terrific piece of work from Dumont that feels unique and distinct. By turns suspenseful, darkly funny, and full of emotional weirdness, it’s not just one of the best films at Cannes, it’s also one of the best films of the year. Like its young characters, the film itself often seems blissfully unaware of just how strange, funny, and emotionally revealing it is, which only makes its impact all the more surprising. Dumont has taken something as simple as childhood play and transformed it into a surprisingly poignant reflection on romance, rivalry, and the overwhelming intensity of feelings before we even fully understand them ourselves.
