Red Island (2023)

Coming of age drama with a difference set in 1970s Madagascar - Red Island review by PD

Set in Madagascar in the early 1970s, the film depicts a strange transitional period for the island nation; a decade after it formally became a Republic but still with several ties to its former colonisers, right up to the continued presence of the French army. Director Robin Campillo himself grew up in an army base, and here we follow the experiences of his screen surrogate Thomas (Charlie Vauselle - excellent), a comics-obsessed youngster fascinated by the lives of the adults around him––always hiding in plain sight to catch glimpses of conversations that are often decidedly not for young ears.

The film consists of a loose patchwork of lived-in memories that are most engaging when filtered through the young protagonist’s perspective; adults discuss their affairs unaware they’ve got an impressionable child hanging onto their every word from under the table, or behind a closed door. Frustratingly, however, the film frequently deviates from the framing we’re supposed to be viewing these scenes through, so it's often a personal film that can’t completely commit to the child’s-eye POV that makes it feel so singular. What the film does best in is anchoring a child’s viewpoint through a range of heightened comic book interludes, as Thomas and his Vietnamese friend Suzanne bond over reading the adventures of the young caped crusader Fantômette. Immediately we’re introduced to a teenage girl in a Zorro-adjacent costume, the only human onscreen fighting against various over-the-top villains in a child-friendly noir playground. The extended interrogation scene that opens the film lasts long enough that you can imagine some cinema-goers leaving to go and ask if they walked into the wrong screening, but the comic book sequences, with each interlude arriving completely unprompted, have the authentically disorienting effect of a child trying to piece together everything they did today into a single anecdote.

Unfortunately, perhaps a problematic issue with 'Red Island' might be that these superhero interludes are more attention-grabbing than the personal coming-of-age drama itself, although these do eventually weave into the main narrative in the final act as Thomas spies on his elders while in a Fantômette costume. If the story were told entirely from Thomas’s perspective, keeping us at arm’s length from getting to know his family beyond his limited understanding of their personal lives, then the fact they aren’t as richly sketched out as characters wouldn't be as much of an issue. But instead we frequently see them away from him, not just catching cryptic glances at their private lives from behind closed doors, which only serves to illustrate how thinly drawn they are; this has the result that, ultimately, the film is too divided in its interests to entirely function as either a political statement or as a precise portrait of childhood in a strange place.

However, for all this, the film's greatest sequences are beautiful evocations of the director’s childhood, both real and imagined. Most effective of all is a telling scene where military families and locals alike watch a 16mm print of Abel Gance’s Napoléon on the beach, projected onto a sheet in front of the waves. As Napoléon fights a storm while Robespierre’s radicals take control of the National Assembly, it acts as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, whilst the final 15 minutes send the film out on a note of optimism for a people asserting their independence.