In the wake of the powerful sexual and political frankness of “BPM,” writer-director Robin Campillo’s award-winning film about HIV/AIDS activism in 1990s Paris, “The Red Island” initially feels like a step back. To a More Comfortable Nostalgia – a childlike look at life on a French military base in Madagascar in the 1970s, bathed in sunshine, and infused with the excitement of youthful exploration. This may seem like a stupid way to depict a time and place rife with post-colonial tensions, just two years before the African territories liberated themselves from the French collectivity to become a full-fledged republic. But Red Island is a more subtle work than that, slowly peeling back its willfully naive view of European family life, before shifting sharply to a different perspective, even a different film entirely.
This switch is both striking and jarring, a structural pivot that makes the film easier to admire than to embrace. However, its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo deftly grapples not only with the blind spots of his personal past, but also with those in his national heritage. Unexpectedly missing from some major festivals and met with lukewarm reviews at home, “Red Island” doesn’t quite have the assurance or verve of “BPM” or Cambio’s directorial debut “Eastern Boys,” but it still maintains that its director A major name in contemporary French cinema – a cinema that can fill a sprawling canvas with great visual imagination and sensory detail.
The film opens with a disorienting flourish of imagination: a miniature jump-shot set in a cardboard-and-felt theme park, following the crime-fighting exploits of masked child superhero Zorro Phantomite (Kalisa Oskal-Ull). These turn out to be the vivid imaginations of ten-year-old Thomas (Charlie Fussell), inspired by his favorite comic book series; These daydreams recur throughout the film, demonstrating a young mind that easily drifts away from reality. However, there is plenty of adventure and intrigue in Thomas’s daily life, which is, after all, set on a tropical African island far from his homeland. He just needs to know where to look for him – when he begins his nightly investigations, imitating the Phantomite.
Thomas’s father, suave army officer Robert (Kim Gutierrez, radiating Belmondo charm), and his mother Colette (Nadja Tereshkiewicz) care little for their son’s exploits, raising him and his siblings in a vaguely permissive manner. They are greatly distracted by the tensions in their marriage, as Colette begins to doubt her husband’s fidelity. So can she. An air of vulgar sexual freedom permeates the base, where the soldiers frequent a brothel staffed by local Malagasy women—one of whom, Miyangali (Amelie Rakotoarimalala), becomes the object of obsessive desire for married new recruit Bernard (Hughes Delamillière). Thomas’ nocturnal snooping doesn’t show any comic book crime, but it does make him an incapable witness to such bits of adult mischief.
Campillo sensitively depicts the ensuing shift between childish fantasy and disillusionment, which corresponds precisely with the French’s careless abandonment of colonial ideals – their days there are numbered, and everyone is waiting for the next chapter of their lives to begin. The Malagasy were not so passive, tirelessly seeking their imminent independence, and they feature in the background of the film until Miangali takes over the narrative focus in a pivotal denouement of her people’s revolution. At the same time, the white figures whom we have heretofore assumed to be the collective self are cast into the margins. It’s a stark, defining shift that will divide audiences: it’s hard not to wish Miangali’s character had developed more richly in parallel with the others throughout, though the symbolic impact of her belated takeover is clear.
There’s a hint of self-effacement in Campillo’s downgrading of his coming-of-age narrative, an acknowledgment of the smallness of his memories compared to the seismic island story of the time, even if the film never quite yields to more film. Radical ideas. Yet the family scenes still carry weight and pathos, as Thomas gradually comes to terms with his mother’s repressed grief, and Robert’s fatherly gestures (including, most bizarrely, a gift to his children of baby alligators) take on an almost nihilistic despair. DP Jeanne Lapoirie captures Madagascar’s burnt-orange days and humid, inky nights with equal saturated intensity, making it a fitting backdrop for hot and bothersome emotions on all sides. Campillo’s memory may have evolved and matured, but it clearly has not faded.