A debut

In the sad year of 2020 (not only obviously for cinemas), a rumor spread among the specialists and concerned the debut of a couple of French directors capable of impressing the selectors of the Cannes Film Festival to the point of choosing their film for the official competition. Obviously, not everyone gets to enter the most important festival in the world right away.

Now after hiding, the film hits theaters. It is Gagarine directed by Fanny Liatard and Jeremy Trouilh and written by the two with Benjamin Charbit.

Sixteen-year-old Youri has always lived in the Gagarin Towers, a large popular residential complex on the outskirts of Paris. He dreams of becoming an astronaut when the complex's demolition project turns him into a resister. With friends Diana and Houssam, he will undertake a desperate attempt to save his house, which has become his "spaceship".

In France, the film on the outskirts of the banlieue has now become a real genre born in 1995 with La haine by Mathieu Kassovitz (winner of an award at Cannes), a cross-section of the tensions between the French Maghrebi and the police, then updated in the recent I miserabili di Ladj Ly. Two films with a neorealist tone, raw in representing a daily situation of tension in the Parisian suburbs.

In Gagarine, the genre still takes its cue from reality (the film is shot in the real complex named after the Russian astronaut and made of red bricks capable of housing over 370 residential units at Ivry-sur-Seine a few kilometers from Paris) but takes a new road and innovates. For the children in the film, the demolition of the barracks is not an act of urban renewal, but a threat to the community to which they belong and to childhood dreams and memories. Here the boys are endowed with imagination and, unlike in previous films, they fight authority not with weapons (here represented no longer by policemen but by municipal inspectors), transforming the barracks into a spaceship, light bulb after light bulb, with the goal of delaying the cancellation of their world. Will our heroes succeed?

Davide Bracco

NP Marzo 2022