J Paul Johnson
An impressionistic, loosely constructed, and visually striking reminiscence, Robin Campillo’s long-anticipated follow-up to his heralded 2018 film 120BPM, Red Island (L’île rouge) reconstructs the memories of its adolescent protagonist from his boyhood in 1970s Madagascar. At times, those memories are inchoate, others unreliable, yet they are always engaging and striking, hinting at an adult world of politics and sex more than a little beyond the boy’s youthful ken. Campillo’s semi-autobiographical approach allows the story a good deal of latitude. Midway through, Red Island becomes more than a young boy’s simple coming-of-age tale and instead a covert treatise on the subject of colonial rule.
In the early 1970s when tiny Madagascar was newly independent (and where Campillo himself lived for a time), ten-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), wide-eyed and sensitive, lives on a military base with his family. Their existence seems idyllic, if regimented. His father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) spends his days on the base while his beatific mother, Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) befriends the other temporary military families. Little Thomas is rarely far from his mother’s feet—literally—spending his hours and days lollygagging on the floor, lurking under tables, and often spying on his parents and the other teens and adults near the base’s perimeter.
An inspiration for Thomas’s imagination is his fictional comic book heroine Fantômette, whose adventures come to life onscreen in Red Island with live-action scenarios likely influenced by the real-life comic’s 1990s French television adaptation in cut-scenes that lend a giddy, youthful (and unmistakably French) flair to the film. Fantômette (Calissa Oskal-Ool) gaily flits about as she surveils criminals and single-handedly subdues groups of henchmen with her acrobatic maneuvers. Thomas imagines himself a secret superhero of sorts, spying on the adults and teens from a wooden supply box and other hiding spots with his partner-in-cahoots and fellow Fantômette fan Suzanne (Cathy Pham), a local couples’ daughter.
Campillo’s cast is first-rate, beginning with young Vauselle, whose character is a soft-spoken mama’s boy whose wide eyes and expressive countenance betray an intelligence beyond his years. Tereszkiewicz cuts an empathetic figure as Thomas’s mother, Colette, a young woman coming to terms with the permanent sacrifices of motherhood and developing a slow affinity for the island and its peoples. As her husband and Thomas’s father, Gutiérrez is less likeable—he’s quick to cut corners and jump to conclusions and slow to realize when and how his actions hurt others—but no less impactful, looking a little like the roguish young Jean-Paul Belmondo. He’s capable of tenderness but full of a machismo that makes his decisions rash. The supporting cast, including a young couple (Hugues Delamarlière and Luna Carpiaux) in breakup mode and a local sex worker (Amely Rakotoarimalala) are all also excellent.
Were this charming coming-of-age tale all Campillo had to offer with Red Island, it would surely be enough to commend the film as a lovely art-house bildungsroman. But Campillo does not hew so closely to his point-of-view character’s perspective as to limit the film’s scope to what a ten-year-old boy might witness or misinterpret. Aside from the relatively benign sexual innuendo and mild petting Thomas covertly witnesses, on the base and as its staff interacts with the islanders, there is a conflict between the French colonizers of over six decades and the newly independent Madagascans, especially the native Malagasy whose story slowly bubbles toward the surface in the film’s final act.
There and then, one starts to question whether Thomas’s naive perspective is all that trustworthy, and whether his mild obsession with the sexual activity he hopes to witness is the real subject at hand. In short, it’s not, although by the time Red Island reaches this conclusion it feels like the film is practically over and the free future of the Malagasy youth little more than an afterthought. In other words, Red Island is not the type of narrative that marches on from its start to a predestined end with a single intention in mind; rather, here Thomas’s perspective is presented from the start as something naive and subjective, one that cannot possibly account for the complex geopolitics which his family—as part of a waning French military force occupying a sub-Saharan island—intersects.
As an accomplished filmmaker in his middle age, Campillo understands the power and limits of memory. Reminiscences may be fond, but should they be remembered fondly? Or do they simply serve to mask the harsh realities of a military occupation? Red Island hopes to have it both ways and while it feels, for all its strengths—delightful visuals, an impeccable cast, deft storytelling—like the meandering of a mind unsure exactly what to make of the memories it depicts, the film is never not engaging. Each scene unfolds like a time-lapse flower in bloom, revealing sly and clever new details as it progresses towards a well-tended garden in kaleidoscopic color.
