Cinematographer Marine Atlan‘s feature film directorial debut “La Gradiva” takes a simple premise — teenagers on a class trip — and uses it to explore the vast worlds of their individual interiority with insight, empathy, and grace. Mercifully free of typical high school movie tropes, the teenagers at the heart of Atlan’s film are fully realized people, whose fears and desires and ambitions and loneliness and dreams, as well as the intensity of their messy teenage feelings, are treated utmost respect by Atland and co-writer Anne Brouillet, allowing their work to reach toward the sublime.
The film’s title alludes to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel “Gradiva: a Pompeian fantasy,” which tells the tale of an archaeologist obsessed with the bas-relief of a woman he sees in an Italian museum. Imagining she was among those who died in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, he names her la Gradiva (or “she who walks”). Jensen’s novel led to a psychological reading by Freud and became a popular subject of Surrealist art.
Like the novel and the works it inspired, Atlan’s film is about the layers below our consciousness, where our desires and our fears and our anger boil until we can no longer contain them. But it’s also about the way that we project a version of ourselves to others, and the dangers of allowing our surface level understanding of people to affect our judgments of them.
We first meet this rowdy troupe of French high schoolers, who are awaiting their college acceptance letters as they travel to Naples via train, where they will not only discover the ruins of Pompeii and all that the destruction wrought by Vesuvius has trapped in time, but also who they are becoming as they move into the adult world. These kids are messy and raw, they’re smart and sensitive, but also have the capacity for cruelty. Pressures mount as the trip progresses, both from their impending futures, but also the pressure that comes with spending so much time with your peers in close quarters. It builds within each kid like the mighty volcano at whose base they find themselves. Will they find a restorative release for this tension, or will they destroy everything in the path like Mount Vesuvius?
At the center of this group is Toni (Colas Quignard), a vibrant young man with a penchant for Grindr hookups whose boisterous charm goes a long way to mask his fragile heart. Then there’s his best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), who is introduced in a post-coital haze on board a train with Angela (Hadya Fofana). Their tryst is observed by Toni, who is in turn observed by Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a bookish girl who believes herself to be one of the “unfuckable” women who make other women “fuckable” by comparison (a dream sequence in which Suzanne imagines herself both as la Gravida herself and taking James’ place in his train tryst with Angela connects the film back to the Freudian and surrealist impact of Jensen’s novel). Leading the trip is the harried teacher Mercier (Antonia Buresi) whose desire to inspire passion in her students is clearly starting to lose its spark in her late career.
Before the train arrives in Naples, Toni shares a family fable of his own, illustrated by a faded old photograph. In it his grandmother stands with help in front of a grand old manor. Her gaze is fixed on the other side of the photograph, where Toni’s grandfather stands with his family, looking sharp in an expensive suit. As Toni tells it, his grandparents fell in love immediately, a coup d’foudre. When she became pregnant with his mother, his grandfather’s family disowned him, but before the star-crossed lovers could run away together, Toni’s grandfather was killed in the 1980 earthquake that shook Naples, allegedly destroying the family manor as well. That’s when his grandmother left for France, never daring to love anyone else again.
It’s one hell of a tale, in a way its own Pompeian fantasy, and one that has become a guiding light for Toni, a secret romantic whose love for James is obvious for everyone except the object of his affection himself.
While much of the movie rides on these young actors’ extraordinary abilities to carry both dialogue-heavy scenes as well as contemplating moments of silence, of reflection and observation, Atlan has not crafted a social realist picture. Working in lockstep with co-cinematographer Pierre W. Mazoyer, Atlan wraps her film in a warm, sun-dappled glaze, rife with film grain and like leaks that places the story in a world adjacent to those created by Alice Rohrwacher and her longtime DP Hélène Louvart in their fable-like collaborations. Much like Rohrwacher’s politically and emotionally potent cinema, Atlan places her characters in an almost otherworldly land unstuck in time, but anchors them in both timeless tales of love and friendship, but also the economics and other socio-political realities that pull our dreams down to earth.
Scenes of the stressed out Mercier desperately trying to get her disaffected students to engage in her lessons about volcanology and art history, to see the relevance in the deaths of the people of Pompeii so many centuries ago, are contrasted with much more lively after dinner discussions in which these same students. While the relevance of the past may not yet connect with these young people, the concerns of the present absolutely do.
In one riveting sequence, Mercier watches as her pupils debate the veracity of meritocracy in our late capitalist society, with some of the kids clearly spouting privileged nonsense parroted from their well to do parents, while others point to their own lived experiences that prove the opposite to be true. It’s in these moments where we see the strength not only of Atlan and Brouillet’s sharp script, but of the talented young cast (of mostly newcomers) that she has assembled.
The biggest discovery here is Colas Quignard as Toni, who is tasked with carrying the film’s most explosive story arc. When first introduced, Quignard plays Toni with the kind of gravitas that comes naturally when you’re the coolest kid in school and everyone knows it. But Toni is a sensitive kid, one who feels everything deeply. As his fantasies about his grandparents slowly erode, revealing the harsh economic truths about the relationship between the aristocracy and those who serve them, he also loses his belief in love at first sight. He folds into himself, his swagger fading while his loud mouth drifting into silent contemplation. Eschewing dialogue almost completely by the end, Quignard’s defeated body language speaks volumes for anyone attending to its desperate frequency. My heart ached as I watched him silently make an irrevocable choice that no one else seemed to notice until it was too late.
At two hours and twenty minutes “La Gradiva,” which recently won the top prize at the Cannes sidebar Semaine de la Critique (Critics’ Week), casts a hypnotic spell, fully immersing the audience into the world of Toni and his peers, Atlan makes sure that we feel all of their angst and their desires, their openness to the world, but also their hesitations.
It is so wholly transporting that its running time flies by unnoticed, and as it barrels toward its melancholic end, you’re left breathless in your seat wishing you could spend more time with these kids, hoping they will all be OK, even while knowing that life still has many more knocks waiting for them, and that perhaps none will be ever be as monumental as when love is lost, but if you have patience, also when it is found.
Grade: A
“La Gradiva” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it at a later date.
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