It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for new directors, the Competition most often reserved for well-established auteurs. Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond is one of the handful of first features to secure a Competition berth, and this can be a double-edged sword. From an art film perspective, the exposure couldn’t be higher. But by placing Wild Diamond among films by the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos, David Cronenberg, and Jia Zhangke, the festival programmers are setting sky-high expectations for the film, ones it almost certainly cannot live up to. And indeed, Wild Diamond is a promising but largely unsophisticated film, with Riedinger often making her very obvious themes even more explicit through dialogue.
“Beauty gives people hope,” says 19-year-old Liane (newcomer Malou Khebizi), and that hope comes in the form of Instagram- and TikTok-driven e-fame. Liane has fantasies of becoming an online influencer, and when we first meet her, she has a paltry 10,000 followers. (I know, right?) Her fortunes appear to change when she gets a call from a casting agent (Antonia Buresi) asking her to audition for the new season of a reality show called Miracle Island. In the audition scene, Liane is standing in front of a neutral background, wearing next to nothing, all the better to show off the boob job she paid for by waiting tables. Liane promises that she will “make a buzz,” and she does. Once she posts that she’s auditioned for Miracle Island, her social media presence explodes, and she starts to think she may have found a way out of her dead-end life.
The contrast between Liane’s online existence and her material one could hardly be starker. She lives with her unemployed mother (Andréa Bescond), who has a revolving door of “sugar daddies,” and her younger sister Alicia (Ashley Romano), whose garish, exaggerated make-up resembles Liane’s. Caring for her little sister seems to be Liane’s only consistent tether to the offline world. Even her friends look as if they’ve walked out of a low-rent nightclub, poor girls badly play-acting at sophistication. Then again, as Riedinger takes great pains to point out, the baseline for sophistication in contemporary media has devolved considerably. Liane says she hopes to be “the new Kim Kardashian,” and they share that family’s obsession with ostentatious wealth, cartoonish body modification, and a blasé conviction that superficiality is the coin of the realm, that a pornographic hyper-femininity is the key to self-empowerment.
If this all sounds like it’s coming from the perspective of an old man (which I guess I am) or a conservative scold (which I’m not), no matter. Riedinger has already established a place for the judgmental viewer. After an opening scene that finds Liane practicing stripper-pole moves on a lamp post in a parking lot, we see her being harassed on the Metro. A young man calls her a “slut” and a “whore,” and this is understandably painful for Liane. Thing is, she seems to confuse her online personality with who she actually is, and who she will naturally be in real life. If there’s anything in Wild Diamond that could charitably be called subtext, it’s that Gen Alphas take for granted that they are their own images, that the Internet is more real than anything out in the streets. This speaks to a collapse of traditional notions of psychological interiority, but as we see, Liane is a person with a subjectivity, stranded in a liminal space within a society in rapid transition.
One suspects these very au courant topics were what led the team at Cannes to place Wild Diamond in Competition, but it might also be a nagging sense of familiarity. In 1999, the Dardenne brothers won the Palme d’Or for their film Rosetta, and in many respects Wild Diamond is the same film, only updated for this skin-deep phase of hypercapital. Like Liane, Rosetta lived with an inattentive mother in lower-class conditions. Like Liane, Rosetta was always hustling to try to find ways to make it out of this dead-end life and make something of herself. But Rosetta saw her escape in the service economy, managing a waffle stand. Brick-and-mortar commerce, tangible product. Liane can only fathom becoming an online influencer or a reality TV star because all we produce are signs, aspirational images of a good life hardly any of us will ever achieve. And, like Rosetta, Liane finds a boy, Dino (Idir Azougli), who really cares about her, seeing her as a human being rather than a commodity. But love and money prove incompatible. Riedinger contrasts Dino’s words of support with the praise and vulgarity left by anonymous commenters on Liane’s Insta. In the end, Liane casts her lot with the dopamine hit of social media, and Wild Diamond suggests that even if it’s not the right choice, it’s the only one a young adult in 2024 could ever be expected to make.
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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