Their children after them: a sanitized adaptation of Goncourt by Nicolas Mathieu [critique]

Despite an electrifying cast, the Boukherma brothers miss their target.

The working class did not end up going to heaven. Against a backdrop of social disenchantment, in the middle of the 1990s, in a valley where the blast furnaces no longer smoke, three teenagers, two boys and a girl, for four summers, live for whatever it takes, and learn to love each other, to to fight, to grow. It was the novel by Nicolas Mathieu (Their children after themGoncourt 2018), it is now the film of the Boukherma brothers.

But where the book hit hard (and right), its adaptation pours into a syrupy nostalgia. Exit social roughness, social dereliction. Make way for a pop polish and Instagrammable energy. The staging in fact plays the card of saturated colors, and attempts to breathe glamor into the industrial landscapes of the ravaged East. A few visual flashes (industrial wastelands at dusk, fights choreographed like Leone) poorly mask the absence of bite or sharpness which were the prize of the original material.

Everything, basically, is like the random musical bludgeoning which alternates between Iron Maiden, Goldman or NTM and transforms the collective tragedy into karaoke nineties. There remains the solid casting. All the actors are filmed like Greek demigods (imperial Paul Kircher, strong and fragile Ludivine Sagnier or wildly beautiful Sayyid El Alami), but by trading heartbreaking melancholy for forced feel-good, the directors betray deep down the essence of Mathieu's novel. No more broken destinies and aborted dreams: cinema prefers nostalgia to raw truth.

By Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma. With Paul Kircher, Angelina Woreth, Ludivine Sagnier… Duration 2h16. Released December 4, 2024