Red Island First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

It can be easy to read too much into the whims of the film festival landscape, especially as to why a particular notable film was not selected. That being said, Robin Campillo's Red Island is surely one of the most bafflingly, instantly memory-holed films in recent memory. In 2017, Campillo had seemed to be a director on the doorstep of widespread recognition. At that year's Cannes, his 120 BPM (Beats per Minute), a wonderful film about the French ACT UP movement in the 1990s—equal parts taut activist procedural and tender relationship drama—won the Grand Prix and had seemed destined for the Palme d'or. Pitched at the mainstream yet still possessing Campillo's precise eye and committed politics, his breakthrough as a major auteur seemed assured. Now, with his follow-up six years later, Red Island failed to be selected by Cannes and premiered to little fanfare in French cinemas shortly afterwards. For better or worse, this suits Red Island's general focus on fantasies slipping away. It begins with one such daydream, a world of miniature buildings and puppet-faced men facing off against a young, masked girl. This is quickly revealed to be a visualization of the superhero Fantômette, the heroine of a long-running French book series, and a particular obsession of Campillo's stand-in: Thomas (Charlie Vauselle). The film's setting is Military Base 181 on Madagascar, specifically from the years 1970-1972, a period after the island's independence from French colonial rule in 1960 but while the military was still allowed to stay on their bases and work with the local troops. The unusual chyron establishes something of the odd paradox the film finds itself in: it is at once lackadaisical and urgent, a period of relaxation with a clear eye on how swiftly everything will end. Not that Thomas, peering out from the army crate that he often retreats to, sees this incoming loss of his home. Instead, his gaze is fixed upon the adults around him, particularly his airman father Robert (Quim Gutierrez) and loving mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), along with his burgeoning friendship with classmate and fellow Fantômette-lover Suzanne (Cathy Pham). Though time is marked throughout until the final day before the troops' departure—which takes up about a third of the two-hour film—including in a particularly telling Christmas scene, complete with Santa emerging from a paratrooper plane, Campillo's film is diffuse, caught between its youthful perspective and more vast questions of identity and France's place in a locale it has subjugated for too long. Most notably, an officer named Bernard is left by his homesick wife and begins a series of flirtations with various local women. This eventually leads to what may be seen as the film's ultimate gambit: Red Island is told from the perspective of the white family members until its final fifteen minutes, when Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), Bernard's girlfriend, has a conversation in Malagasy with a native soldier, before leaving the base and impulsively joining a celebration of the release of imprisoned protestors. The ending is purposefully hopeful, in a way that, while commendable, smooths over the ambiguous nature of the family's final interactions: hints of an impending divorce upon their return to France, the genderbending sequence of Thomas lurking in a Fantômette costume at night. If Red Island is ultimately too divided in its interests to entirely function as either a grand statement on French troops in Madagascar or as a precise portrait of childhood in a strange place, it is still able to summon a certain evocative feeling. Trading in 120 BPM's Scope framing for Academy ratio, Campillo plays up the surreality of certain moments: parachuters in a jagged line over the hills of Madagascar, the family's slow-motion efforts to shoo hornets out of the bathroom, all of the absurdly juvenile but pleasingly handmade Fantômette sequences. Most effective of all is a telling scene where military families and locals alike watch a 16mm print of Abel Gance's Napoléon on the beach, projected onto a sheet in front of the waves. As Napoléon fights a storm while Robespierre's radicals take control of the National Assembly, it acts as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, this one ending before our eyes.