‘And Their Children After Them’ Review: Small-Town French Youth Adrift

If you’ve spent time in towns in the far-flung provinces of any number of European countries — particularly ones in which mills that supplied the economic lifeblood of working-class communities have closed, leaving inhabitants adrift without a raft — chances are you’ll recognize the fictional Northeastern French setting of And Their Children After Them (Leurs enfants aprés eux). These are places stuck in time, usually around the point when their industries were shuttered. That fossilization can be observed at public celebrations where the locals mob the dance floor when the cheesiest of Euro-pop relics are blasted over the speakers, in this case Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon.”

Writer-director brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma capture that atmosphere with such specificity and melancholy fondness in their ambitious adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s 2018 Prix Goncourt-winning novel that it’s easy to imagine they lived it — or at least something very close to it. The coming-of-age story unfolds over four summers at two-year intervals, 1992-1998, but it could almost pass for a couple of decades earlier.

Emerging actor Paul Kircher, who turned heads in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy and Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom, plays awkward introvert Anthony, who’s 14 when we first meet him. Wearing a leather motorcycle jacket in sweltering heat, possibly because he believes it gives him a bit of cool swagger, he flicks a cigarette in the lake then grumbles to his cousin (Louis Memmi) that the water is too gross for swimming.

He takes the plunge though when two teenage girls, Clémence (Anouk Villemin) and Steph (Angélina Woreth), swim out to a floating platform and his terminally horny (unnamed) cousin invites himself to join them. The twitchy intensity with which Anthony sneaks glances at the slightly older Steph indicates his complete lack of game around girls and marks the beginning of a first love destined for the most part to remain agonizingly out of reach.

Steph and Clémence invite them to a party that night at a friend’s place too far outside the town center of Heillange, where they live, to go on bicycles. Anthony’s cousin prods him to “borrow” the precious motorbike his father Patrick (Gilles Lellouche) keeps under a cover in the garage. Anthony has enough experience to know how it would inflame his hot-tempered alcoholic dad, even without the warning of his careworn mother Hélène (Ludivine Sagnier, terrific), but he sneaks off on the Yamaha anyway. That turns out not to be the only impulsive decision that will reverberate across the story’s six-year span.

It’s obvious the minute they get to the party that rich folks’ houses are a foreign land to them. When he’s left alone after his unintimidated cousin is whisked off by Clémence, Anthony mopes around getting progressively drunker and wobblier. But he jumps on an opportunity to try to impress Steph when Moroccan kid Hacine (Sayyid El Alami) and his friend are told they’re not welcome at the conspicuously white party. Hacine kicks over a barbecue on the way out, almost hitting Steph, and Anthony humiliates him by sticking out a foot to trip him.

That spur-of-the-moment act is the other trigger for a domino effect of anger, retaliation and violence affecting Anthony and his family, as well as Hacine and his father Malek (Lounès Tazaïrt).

Without pushing the point too hard, the Boukhermas use mirroring to show how alike the two families are despite their cultural differences, down to Patrick and Malek being former co-workers at the steel mill that keeps looming into the frame like a hulking monument to vanished industry. The script also connects the predetermined likelihood of both Anthony and Hacine — as the title suggests — struggling to get out and make a life for themselves someplace less stultifying.

The writer-directors follow the novel in making Anthony the focus, which leaves Hacine feeling short-changed, particularly since El Alami, with his brooding good looks and fiery eyes, is a compelling presence. His entry into the local drug trade, for instance, comes up once and is never mentioned again, though the filmmakers’ decision to contain events within the four summers makes it inevitable that the audience will be left to fill in some gaps.

Interwoven with the acts of aggression between them are threads tracing the dissolution of Anthony’s family and the poignant string of disappointments that keep Steph just out of reach. Over and over, opportunities for connection are narrowly missed, including an attempt at rapprochement with his son by Patrick — who morphs gradually from a snarling brute into a wreck of a man, conveyed with a lot of pathos and a little heavy-handedness by Lellouche in moving scenes toward the end.

The “almost” aspect of the story is felt most acutely in Anthony’s efforts to get close to Steph. She’s played by the captivating Woreth as a young woman who, despite her more comfortable middle-class upbringing, has her own problems and insecurities, which are perhaps what give her an affinity with Anthony and keep her from rejecting him outright.

As Anthony gets older, a bruising strain comes into play with Vanessa (Christine Gautier), a friend of his sister first seen with her lank hair in the saddest barrettes, willing to be his consolation booty call. There’s no attempt to disguise the fact that sullen, withdrawn Anthony is a flawed character — using Vanessa with little regard for her feelings; casually racist because that’s the environment he grew up in; and reluctant to accept an olive branch when it’s offered.

Even so, Kircher plays him with a guilelessness that softens his rough edges. He comes across as uncertain in conversations, either not responding or taking forever to say a word. His nervousness around Steph is especially touching as he shuffles along with a halting gait that’s almost Chaplin-esque. He seems to have grown into his body a little more with each two-year time jump. But even when he returns toughened up from a stint in the army, to some degree he remains a vulnerable boy.

All that gives the moments when reciprocal love with Steph seems possible more weight, notably a tender scene at a Bastille Day celebration during which they dance to the Dylan-esque Francis Cabrel song “Samedi soir sur la terre.” That’s one of many soulful needle drops sprinkled throughout, drawing from both French and international songs either of the time or earlier.

The emotional force of Amaury Chabauty’s supple orchestral score swells incrementally and helps shift the mood at key points, like the moment early on when the carefree pleasures of summer are abruptly wiped away by despair, fear and rage.

This is a sizable step up for the Boukherma brothers from the smaller-canvas genre films they have done up to now and they bring a satisfying cinematic sweep to the material that feels more Hollywood than French — for better or worse. Their sensitive direction of the intimate exchanges is sharp, even if scenes veer at times from melodrama into soap.

Traveling shots have become something of a cliché in French films about youth and the directors certainly don’t hold back on them, cruising along with the characters in several fluid tracking sequences — on bicycles, motorbikes, a stolen canoe. But they give the film a pleasing rhythm, and DP Augustin Barbaroux’s limpid visuals find both beauty and stagnancy in the locations.

The movie gets a little baggy here and there, and the running time of just under two-and-a-half hours could use some pruning, though the length is obviously in keeping with the bildungsroman on which it’s based. More social and political context might have made it justifiable.

A deep vein of sadness runs through And Their Children After Them. Even moments of joy, like faces in a crowd gazing up at Bastille Day fireworks while a Johnny Hallyday song plays, or a bar full of people exploding with euphoria at France’s 1998 World Cup win, never quite erase the sense of one generation after another, bored and stuck, left behind by those with the means to make it out.