Robin Campillo confronts innocence and revolution.
Before “empire” became a dirty word, the great French humanist Jean Renoir made The River, a complex, moving film from 1951 about a white British family in India, sensitively aware of crossing cultural traditions. Robin Campillo’s Red Island recalls Renoir’s masterpiece, updating its cross-cultural sensitivity to France’s occupation of Madagascar just prior to that country’s declaration of full independence in 1960.
Campillo trades Renoir’s sophistication for his own biography, represented by eight-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), who observes colonialism with a child’s naïveté about adulthood and the world. Thomas’s father, enlistee Robert Lopez (Quim Gutiérrez), adapts himself to French military protocol, and his mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) adjusts to marriage and young motherhood.
The stress of displacement is vivified beyond Thomas’s comprehension. Campillo’s title, Red Island (L’île rouge), indicates the sensual aspect of the French occupier’s exposure to Madagascar’s natural, non-European habitat, conveyed through color and visual exoticism by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (best known for André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds).
Thomas’s youthful bewilderment dominates the film’s first two-thirds (where the boy’s fantasies about comic-book heroine Fantomette translate his prepubescent displacement). Campillo then shifts perception to his own grown-up awareness of Madagascar’s sub-rosa political turmoil.
This transition is stunning. We’ve gotten so accustomed to Western self-loathing that Campillo simply contemplates the colonial guilt — that stumbling block that Renoir’s civilized vision could transcend. Modernist Campillo connects to the sexual politics familiar from Claire Denis’s postcolonial films Chocolat and Beau Travail but without the Frantz Fanonian angst.
The outsider guilt felt by Thomas’s parents and their expatriate friends at the military compound is not overdone, as it is in the Kenya-set White Mischief or Out of Africa. (Sydney Pollack displayed no sensibility, relying instead on Hollywood imperialist clichés.) The expats’ casually racist beachside commentary on the blacks in Madagascar (a multiethnic nation) comes from attuning themselves to the military-compound mindset — the white gravel grounds next to fuchsia plants make the cultural contrasts almost palpable. Thomas huddles under a table listening to adults talk of brothels, venereal disease, and careless Legionnaires, drawing us into the complicated experience.
Red Island is also deft about innocence. “This is not for your ears,” Colette (a wonderfully sensitive performance by Tereszkiewicz from François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine) tells her eavesdropping son. Campillo intercuts the parents’ marital tension with sensual flashbacks to their erotic détente.
Little Thomas’s private idyll — exploring the territory’s foreboding forest at night with a flashlight illuminating a chapel’s stained-glass windows — suggests what Spielberg’s The Fabelmans should have been. It’s a gorgeous sequence of awed, mystifying discovery.
Campillo goes to the roots of his previous films Eastern Boys and BPM, which addressed immigration and AIDS activism. That Red Island transition — from European alienation to an uprising that led to Madagascar’s liberation — changes our perception from the “white gaze” to third-world empathy. Renoir was rarely so blatantly political (except in his 1938 French Revolution film La Marseillaise), but Campillo eases into politics through personal intermingling: Thomas observes his father’s comrade Huissens (Hugues Delamarlière) going native with Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala). This is a superior perception to the simplistic, Manichaean genocide of The Zone of Interest. In Red Island, Campillo preserves imperialism in a kind of amber, closely studying participants in the sociological experiment like insects in entomology — the identity issues that Thomas’s Spanish-born father carries from Europe and the maternal conflicts of youthful Colette. (“You’re strange, you’re not like you,” Thomas says to his inebriated mother at a party. She answers, “We put children to bed so they don’t see us like this.”) “Stranger in Paradise,” the hit from the 1953 musical Kismet, is the film’s theme song.
Thomas’s fully costumed Fantomette fancies are Campillo’s only miscalculation, conceding to today’s comic-book superhero trend — an inadequate parallel to contemporary globalism (as Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon has shown). Campillo ideally calls on his French art-movie heritage in the film’s rhythmic visual metaphors, such as Lopez’s imported Aragonite table set with phosphorescent gems that resemble the military’s aerial reconnaissance maps. Campillo advances from Renoir’s humanism and the idiosyncratic patriotism of Abel Gance, whose Napoleon is screened al fresco for the homesick French occupiers.
Gance’s rhythms recur in the surging finale that depicts Madagascar’s political uprising and cultural rebellion (spurred by Miangaly’s smiling, radical compatriot who resembles Frankie Lymon). Campillo’s politically engaged enthusiasm takes over, as in BPM. Free of patronization and guilt, this un-self-conscious, almost scary pageant envisions the West letting go. Naïve but sympathetic, Campillo imagines the sudden excitement and abandon of revolution as if from the inside. As New Order sang, guilt is a useless emotion; Campillo seeks understanding.