Red Island

Madagascar is a region hardly talked about, except in general to deplore its extreme poverty. It is , moreover, a country where - before "L'Île rouge (Red Island)" - no movie was shot for about thirty-five years, resulting in a dramatic lack of specific equipment and facilities as a result. Through filming a story set in Madagascar as its sole setting, Robin Campillo ("They Came back", "120 Beats Per Minute") actually takes the first step to making up for this double injustice; let him be congratulated for that. All the more so since at the time of its filming the COVID pandemics was at its peak. Under such conditions it is a real feat that "Red Island" not only exists but manages, against all odds, to tell its tale, at once a page of the country's history and a slice of the author's personal childhood. No small ambition assuredly. Which makes me feel a bit embarrassed, for I have to confess that I did not like the film very much, interesting and sincere as it is. Where the shoe pinches actually, at least in this writer's eyes, is that the whole thing does not entirely live up to its aspirations.

Interesting, yes, insofar as the scene (a French air base in Madagascar), the time (a couple of months between 1971 and 1972) and the situation (the tensions between the elected president Tsiranana, the French forces and the Malagasy people) have hardly ever (or even never ?) been depicted in a fiction film.

Interesting also because the narrative is, as I wrote, based on Campillo's own memories, which brings an additional flavor of authenticity to the main plot.

And sincere, for the writer-director, far from judging his characters, does justice to all of them, including the "sinful" ones, Bernard (and his infidelity) and Guedj (and his leaning on alcohol) The trouble to my mind is that, while aiming to study the dysfunction of a family falling apart, « Red Island » offers the mere sketch of a serious analysis. A pity because actually everything was in place for a quality psychological drama around the husband, Warrant Officer Robert Lopez (not evil, but rigid and authoritarian), the wife (married too young, too idle, frustrated by her restrictive role as mother and housewife), and their little boy Thomas (growing up in between). The portrait, I'm afraid, is singularly lacking in depth, and when Campillo takes stock of the decay of two other couples, it's even worse.

As a result, perhaps because it's poorly constructed, the film doesn't touch or move us as much as it could. Just compare it to "The Silent Girl", another film released shortly after, also told from a child's point of view, quite overwhelming. Unfortunately here, only a few scenes have any emotional power, the best ones featuring the little boy and his young girlfriend (child actors Charlie Vauselle and Cathy Phan are excellent, and there's a real chemistry between them). For the rest, the performers have little to defend their characters, so much so that they are only sketched out or presented too coldly or too intellectually. Worse, they are sometimes abandoned along the way, like the pieds-noirs couple, Bernard's young wife who can't adjust to life abroad - or introduced far too late, like Bernard, the soldier who falls in love with a Madagascan woman, to be grasped in all their complexity. And what about the treatment of Mingaly (despite the good choice of Malagasy Amely Rakotsarimalaka), soldier Bernard's native mistress? It sounds unbelievable but, it is a fact: she only appears in the last fifth of the story! An overly disjointed narrative, gaping holes in its development, sequences that are too long and others too short prevent anything more than episodic buy-in.

Another of the film's weaknesses is the amount of time given over to animated sequences featuring the children's favorite heroine Fantômette. It's been a recent (and disputable) fashion in French cinema to sprinkle animated sequences throughout a live-action film ("Tout le monde aime Jeanne", "Ama Gloria", etc.). In this writer's eyes, in the Fantômette sequences in "Red Island" not only have none of the magic of childhood but they're banally animated and only remotely metaphorical. Above all, they bring nothing significant to the whole, taking up instead a large amount of footage that could have been devoted to deepening the characters' psychology. The ending beats all records for "non-cinema": turning into a tract film, the final quarter of an hour or so inflicts us with no fewer than three political speeches on the run as well as a protest march with no real drama at stake, making us sink into the most crass boredom.

All in all, "Red Island" is a missed opportunity for Robin Campillo, and I regret it. The director, who has proved in the past how good he can get, had all the cards in his hand to make a major film though, with unprecedented historical, geographical, psychological and memorial dimensions. He has only succeeded in making a respectable work, unfortunately too poorly put together to be called a masterpiece.