Robin Campillo follows up his sensational 2017 Cannes Grand Prix winning aids drama 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) with a child’s eye view of Madagascar in the early 1970s during the dying embers of French colonial rule. Red Island hews even closer than before to autobiographical details from Campillo’s own life, with the director having spent part of his childhood living on a military base on the island.
While his previous film was filled with a strident rage, this quasi-fictional reimagining of Campillo’s youth adopts a gentler and more visually sumptuous tone; but this idyll is shown to be a delusion as we bear witness to a young child’s slow awakening to the evils of colonialism. The languidly paced action is seen through the curious and subjective eye of 10-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), who acts as our eavesdropper of the surroundings. It is 1971, and Thomas and his older siblings live on a French military base withqqq their oafish, mid-ranking officer father Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) and dotish mother Collette (Nadia Tereskiewicz). The country is nearly 12 years independent and still hasn’t fully severed ties with the French, but this base, we are told, is the last of its kind — and not for too much longer. There is a mournfulness hanging in the air, even as we see the family engage in lively dinner parties and beach gatherings.
When Thomas is not spending his days idly hanging out with his friend Suzanne (Cathy Pham) on bike or foot, or reading the comic books of the female caped crusader Fantômette, he is spying on the grown-ups around him: peering through the slats in a wooden box, hiding underneath bustling tables, perched against a window or at an erotically-charged spot known as the lover’s tree. As one character observes, “If you watch people long enough, you uncover things,” and it is through Thomas that we witness the often complicated adult relationships like the erotic intensity of lovers and the ugly underbelly of colonialism. Much like Claire Denis’ Chocolat, which also looked at colonialism through the eyes of a small child, Campillo intermingles the political and historical with childhood memory, eroticism and heat.
This is a deeply personal story for Campillo, and Jeanne Lapoirie’s lush cinematography utilises evocative and imaginative flourishes to bring this dream memory to life. The marbled surface of aragonite table turning into an aerial shot of the Madagascan landscape, bodies at a party shown dancing through mottled glass or a night time walk bathed in torch light — the overall effect is intoxicating. This is a gorgeously lensed film with vivid period detail and sensual imagery befitting a location that one character describes, in no uncertain terms, as the most beautiful place on earth.
Perhaps the most intriguing choice is the decision to include whimsical live-action fantasy sequences from the Fantômette comic books; but while these tonally distinct interludes are imaginatively staged, they can sometimes feel lifted from a completely different film.
Red Island can be viewed as Campillo re-framing and coming to terms with this cocooned colonial existence and the brutal burden of France’s complicity. If there is any criticism of the film, it’s that the insularity of this colonised world means that the native Malagasy population are for the most part completely sidelined,only glimpsed on the fringes. There is an intriguing relationship between a recently transferred young Frenchman (Hugues Delamarlière) and local Malagasy woman Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala) that only starts to come to the fore in the latter half, and it is not till the closing section of the film where we get to hear the perspective of the Malagasys and the extent of their growing resentment. It is the film’s most powerful, rousing moment. Red lsland is a poignant, and sometimes dreamily, absorbing work with the freewheeling and formless structure of memory. As a whole, though, it struggles to come into clear focus.
