Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s beautiful debut film about young love, superbly acted and directed. It is a reminder of how fundamentally dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the emotional dramas of our teen years, and to claim we just want to tell our younger selves to relax and get a sense of humour. In fact, those long-repressed moments of euphoria and humiliation, so dangerous and potentially explosive, will guide us for the rest of our lives, whether or not we acknowledge it.
Atlan’s title is a reference to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novella Gradiva, much admired by Sigmund Freud, in which an archaeologist is transfixed by the image he sees in a Roman museum of a woman he names “Gradiva”, or “she who walks”, and imagines that she existed in Pompeii in AD79, the time of the great Vesuvius eruption; it is something about transplanting the image to a time of such catastrophe that brings him to an understanding of his own lost love.
