The dying days of French colonial rule are given ironically youthful life in Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Set in the early 1970s in Madagascar, the film envisions the end of an empire from the innocent, fragmented perspective of young Thomas, who lives on base with his family and their group of military friends.
Robert and Colette Lopez’s seemingly bourgeois lives are idyllic, defined by the kind of mid-century, picture perfect order that comes with a tight knit group of friends who live practically the same lives. Dinner parties and dancing, outings to the pool and beach, and short-lived conflict. Seen through Thomas’ eyes, however, this idyll wavers. His father Robert’s (Quim Gutierrez, impossibly handsome) thinly veiled toxicity and tempestuousness reveals a profound dissatisfaction with his position in life, while Colette’s (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) wide eyes and ever-so distant personality suggest her own, less easily vocalized frustration.
Tereszkiewicz is an fascinating presence, and an illuminating one, too. In practical terms, she is at least 10 years too young for the role, but her incongruent youthfulness makes her finely attuned relationship to Thomas all the more powerful, as if she were also a child. Thomas grapples with his difference amongst both his family and the larger colonial society on base by constantly shifting his gaze to the margins, for things out of sight, yearning for escape and familiarity. His mother’s growing dissatisfaction with her husband is one such hidden secret, and for that, she is the only adult who ever returns his gaze.
Thomas is taken to hiding in a disused wooden crate, where he reads his Fantomette comics either by himself or with his new friend, Suzanne (Cathy Pham). Periodically, he squints through the gaps between the wooden slats to take in the over-saturated world Campillo and cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie have drawn for him. The vibrant colors are overkill, but deliberately so, like an Old Hollywood fabrication, only a step or two removed from Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, another world where the rules and regulations of militarized life come in sharp relief to a sensuousness and overabundance of expression that need not even be verbalized. It’s hard to miss the queerness, however nascent, coded into Thomas’s behavior, and the shame he’s made to feel for his inexplicable differences. The actor who plays him, Charles Vauselle, bears a not insignificant resemblance to the young boy at the center of Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, not just physically, but for the ways in which they both can simultaneously externalize and mask an impossible-to-describe inner turmoil.
Red Island positions the Lopez family in a liminal space in the military hierarchy. They revel in a cushy lifestyle with servants and expendable income, yet Robert is a disposable cog in the colonial machine. He’s not even allowed to enter the Captain’s Mess Hall because his rank is too low. The only kind of work we see him do is bound to paper; nothing of the daring leaps from the back of airplanes we see done by the Madagascar army. Such ineffectualness colors his behavior at home, which foregrounds shame and discipline rather than compassion. As Thomas explores the worlds beyond the one he knows, his unique position and perspective offer him unseen glimpses behind almost everything, from teenage rendezvous behind a wall of bamboo to the taboo romance between a mess hall waiter and a Malagasy sex worker and parachute mender.
The stark contrast between Thomas and Robert reflects the irreconcilable, two-pronged nature of colonialism itself, billed by its perpetrators as an act of generosity through oppression. Campillo’s attention to the incongruousness of a sensitive child’s conflicted inner life and the harshness of the colonial project makes Red Island such a rewarding experience. Its languid mood, rich colors and textures, and tenuously connected narrative threads belie a deeply personal reflection that is never solipsistic, and a final act hand-off to a tentatively hopeful future is the grounding effort the film needs to truly soar.
DIRECTOR: Robin Campillo; CAST: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutiérrez, Charlie Vauselle, Amely Rakotoarimalala; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN THEATERS: August 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
