Red Island
Directed by Robin Campillo
Written by Robin Campillo, Gilles Marchand
Starring Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutiérrez, Charlie Vauselle, Amely Rakotoarimalala
Unrated
Runtime: 117 Minutes
Opening at the Lincoln Film Center on August 16

by Andrea Schmidt, Staff Writer

Beautifully lensed by Jeanne Lapoirie, Red Island (L'île rouge, 2023) portrays a dying colonial empire in what one character terms “is the most beautiful place on Earth.” Director Robin Campillo draws on his childhood experiences as part of a military family stationed in Madagascar for this deeply affecting film. A young boy named Thomas (played wonderfully by Charlie Vauselle) lives with his military family in the former French colony. He, his brothers, and his parents enjoy their lives in this tropical paradise, but as evidenced from the first scene, the family structures, church, and military society are all governed by brutally open racism and misogyny. Thomas observes these interactions with solemn curiosity and silent unease. His friend Suzanne (Cathy Pham) joins him in spying on the older children and adults in the vicinity, as well as reading their beloved superhero Fantômette comic books. Magical realist sequences featuring the girl superhero run parallel the vignettes of family and base life.  In-between brief moments of idyllic respite, familial and workplace tensions run high. Nervous breakdowns, disintegrating marriages, and social exclusion abound. All of these dynamics remain further heightened by the news that the family must ultimately return to mainland France.

The last half hour of the film engages in a shift of perspective from Thomas to Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), a young Malagasy woman who works at the base brothel. For the most part, this narrative transition works and Campillo manages to avoid equivocating the experience of the colonizer (despite his childhood innocence) with those of the colonized. The film’s depiction of a colonial childhood, familial breakdown, and imperial languishment draws comparison with Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1998). I did find myself wishing that Campillo would tend more towards the devastating subtlety of Denis. (For example, towards the end of the film, Miangaly and several of her friends, celebrating the release of Malagasy protestors, sing along with a song about “leaving childhood.”). The Fantômette sequences, interspersed through the film, also tended to drag, and I found myself wondering if the structure of the film would benefit from their absence.

In addition to the adorable Vauselle and Pham, the adults all give complex and engrossing performances. Quim Gutiérrez plays the father with an insecure loathsomeness-angered whenever his wife or children express any sense of interiority or agency. Nadia Tereszkiewicz, at age of 25/26 was logistically too young to play the mother of teenage boys, but her childlike appearance highlights the power imbalance to her husband. (Campillo confirms this casting decision in an interview with The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw.) Primarily through Rakotarimalala’s compelling on-screen presence, does the final quarter of the film work.

The film contains several achingly gorgeous dream-like sequences, which would merit seeing it in the cinema. My personal favorite is the nighttime showing of a silent film storm sequence on a pristine beach-the entire community sits in rapt attention, briefly forgetting the tumult around them for the flickering images. Though not a perfect film, Campillo’s Red Island remains a stirring evocation of childhood and the memory of colonial rot.