A presupposition of Bruno Dumont’s cinema is that the bare world into which we enter is circumscribed by moral order. This should not be confused with a certain brand of moral prescription, for which good or evil acquire an elevated significance and thus become the film’s overarching worldview; rather, to witness a world fashioned by Dumont is to behold it through a prism of vibrant gray, to recognize at the heart of its enterprise the implacable core of human nature. An ironist by trade, Dumont has consistently plumbed the depths of existential meaning: first as tragedy, from which his name and notoriety grew, and then — with 2014’s Li’l Quinquin and beyond — as all-rounded farce, whose unadorned critiques revealed and gave shape to all the protean variations of social, animal life.
His latest, the incandescent Red Rocks, might appear to break free of this dichotomy, centered as it were on an age yet inured to deprivation and thoroughly assured of the world’s fidelity. Antipodal to the Opal Coast setting of his previous sci-fi mashup, The Empire, the azure seas and skies of the south of France now cast a serene backdrop over the boisterous and contained antics of a select group of children. Five-year-old Géo (Kaylon Lancel), a wiry blond-haired squirt, oversees the idyllic territory of Anthéor, Saint-Raphaël: west of Cannes, along the glistening Côte d’Azur, his dominion stretches across the sleepy district, past its distinctive stone viaduct, and onto the Esterel massif, where the rocks turn bright ocher and overlook the coastline below. There is nothing but the day, no adult interference or parental authority; alongside Rouben (Mohamed Coly) and Manon (Louise Podolski), his sidekicks in crime, Géo traverses the landscape in his mini-quad, playing casual sentinel under the solemn overpass, filching from careless campers, and indulging in the vertiginous thrill of cliff-diving off the dazzling promontories.
The sheer tactility of Red Rocks almost beggars belief: though aided by various camera tricks and an acute sense of angling, the film’s intimate framing of its subjects’ scrawny bodies nonetheless imparts both dizzying peril and wondrous adventure, as they repeatedly scale the cragged terrain and launch themselves into the deep below. The images are breathtakingly Malickian, shot with reverential emphasis on faces and brows, courtesy of DOP Carlos Alfonso Corral. The mise-en-scène, however, suggests a more Bressonian attitude toward the looming currents of violence. A rival gang of enfants, commandeered by stocky patriarch B. (Alessandro Piquera), shares the space with Géo’s, and Géo is smitten at first sight with Ève (Kelsie Verdeilles), B.’s nominal girlfriend. What ostensible showdown might have passed between their high-school equivalents is here, fittingly, its play-acting version. Géo sort of steals Ève away from B. They go to her parents’ villa, which is gated and opulent. Above the viaduct sits a train, which they board — unsupervised — and head for the Italian border, where Ève’s grandparents lodge in sporty, comfortable retirement.
One might write Red Rocks off as fantastical pastiche or irreverent comedy; either the Arcadian delusions of a filmmaker past his cynical prime, or the pretend-minimalism of childhood fantasy stripped to its bare, hysterical affects. Neither would be wholly inaccurate, yet beneath the veneer of Dumont’s provocations lies a radically simple observation. Within these kids’ sovereign kingdom, a cosmology develops in tandem with the environment: the rocks beneath a testament to reality, the sea below a force to be conquered, the train high above a constant of the divine firmament, where adults come and go and children, oblivious to danger and unbothered by their inner lives, remain under its auspice. And still the thirst for recognition springs from within. The rocks attest to a combative spirit of assertion and triumph, unsullied for now by greater material awareness of want and wanting. Sex and skin color have not thoroughly realized their political teleologies. Human impulse is, at its center, infinitely present and infinitely malleable, both tragic and farcical. Shifting between genres with chameleonic torpor, Red Rocks belies all the potential of humanity, its puppy loves, its earnestness, its curiosities, its thudding purpose, all on an expanse of open land and sea: a microcosm of old life made anew on the sunny French Riviera.
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