Red Island
L’Île rouge
Robin Campillo (2023)
Robin Campillo was born in 1962 in Morocco, where his father, a member of the French military, was stationed at the time. After stints back in France then Algeria, the family moved to Madagascar. This is the location – and the title location – of Campillo’s first film since 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017). Red Island‘s timespan is 1970-72 and the central consciousness of this semi-autobiographical story is Thomas Lopez (Charlie Vauselle) – who’s the age that Campillo was then. Thomas is the youngest son of Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), who works on the island’s military air base. Thomas is much closer to his mother than to his macho father, who more than once tells the boy not to be a sissy. At a lunch that his parents host early in the film, Thomas is anxious to sit next to Colette. He doesn’t have much to do with his elder brothers, Alain (Mathis Piberne) and Michel (Sacha Cosar-Accaoui); his best friend is Suzanne (Cathy Pham), a little girl in his class at school who’s apparently from a French Indo-Chinese family. Robert Lopez remarks with a mixture of scorn and chagrin that Thomas always hangs out with girls.
Although Madagascar declared independence in 1960, Campillo shows the realisation of that independence as inchoate a decade later. A French military-administrative presence persists on the island (Robert is part of a team training Malagasy paratroopers) – along with colonialist Christian attitudes towards the indigenous population. Supervised by Michèle Mollier (Julie Moulier), a senior warrant officer, local women make parachutes; they also use surplus parachute materials to dress Santa’s grotto for Christmas celebrations at the air base. While the military authorities are happy for soldiers to patronise a brothel on the island, it’s worse than infra dig for a Frenchman to cultivate a romance with a Malagasy girl. When Bernard Huissens (Hugues Delamarlière) falls for Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), who’s one of Mme Mollier’s team of workers, the Catholic padre (Vincent Schmitt) is called in to exorcise the young man. The exorcism doesn’t have the desired effect.
The director, who also wrote the screenplay (with Gilles Marchand), sets himself the challenge of portraying imperial decline and describing adult relationships, particularly the unhappy marriage of Thomas’s parents, through the eyes of a child. Campillo meets the challenge in no uncertain terms. Social set pieces – the lunch at the start; an evening gathering, where the same couples are part of a larger group drinking and dancing – pulse with edgy bonhomie and, beneath it, tensions that remain largely unresolved. The lunch guests include Bernard and his wife Odile (Luna Carpiaux), who are recent arrivals in Madagascar, and a somewhat older couple, the Guedjs (David Serero and Sophie Guillemin). At the evening do, bibulous Guedj beckons his wife and they do a silly-sexy dance together; he then changes partners to Colette. Guedj’s theatrical manner keeps this light-hearted, Colette joins in and the rest of the company laps it up but Robert is not amused. He starts to dance – in a clumsy, aggressively sexual way – with Odile. Bernard looks on, smiling uncomfortably.
It’s crucial that Thomas throughout is decidedly inquisitive. He comes down from his bedroom to try to see what’s going on in the room where the grown-ups are dancing. Frosted glass thwarts him but Colette notices a movement in the glass and leaves the room to discover her youngest son outside. In the conversation that follows he admits that he likes to watch her; she replies, affectionately, that she knows he’s always watching. Ditto Suzanne, a firm believer in spying: you need to keep an eye on people, she tells Thomas, because they ‘hide things’. The two of them snoop on the older Lopez boys’ initiatory cuddles with the daughters of other military personnel. Bernard, who takes up with Miangaly after his marriage to Odile breaks down and she returns to France, becomes a suitable case for medical as well as spiritual treatment: Thomas and Suzanne climb up to a window and watch him being examined by a military base doctor (François-Dominique Blin). Campillo’s young alter ego is such a persistent nosey parker that Thomas, even though he’s not in every scene, comes to seem an almost continuous onlooker.
The fast-moving interplay of jokes and rivalry purely within the Lopez family are just as well handled. A scene with all five of them in the bathroom together, apparently the morning after the dance episode, is an excellent example. The two younger boys are in the bath; their elder brother is feebly attempting to shave; Colette applies mascara and lipstick; Robert comes in to finish dressing and lay down the law. He tells Thomas to stop splashing around in the bath and his wife that she’s wearing too much make-up (he asks who it’s for, without expecting an answer). The bathroom is small and the camera close-up on the actors but Campillo uses this for claustrophobic humour as well as drama. The sequence ends with both parents laughing together as they and the older boys try various methods to clear the bathroom of hornets.
Thomas uses the pocket money he’s saved to buy two tiny stones from an elderly Malagasy merchant (René Ramangason), as a birthday present for Colette. Robert designs a setting for the stones and has a ring made. When Thomas gives this to his mother, she’s delighted and immediately tries it on. Robert, also immediately, points out that he designed the setting. He then proceeds to upstage not just his son’s gift but his wife’s birthday, choosing the occasion to present his sons each with a pet acquired from the jeweller who made the ring: three baby crocodiles, which Colette pronounces ‘hideous’. The crocs come back to bite Robert: they’ve grown somewhat when Alain, for a laugh, puts them in a communal swimming pool and his father is hauled over the coals by the base commander, General Mathiot (Franck Mercadal). Robert isn’t an uncaring father; within a few seconds of reprimanding Thomas for his antics in the bath, he’s thoughtfully putting antiseptic on the boy’s sunburnt shoulders. He does, though, have an insatiable need to show all concerned who’s boss – a need sharpened by self-doubt.
None of the men at the centre of the action is senior in the military hierarchy. Bernard is obviously junior to Robert and Guedj, in years and grade – how junior emerges only when Suzanne tells Thomas that Bernard works in the officers’ bar with her father (Thi Pham). (The latter is actually her stepfather – or so Suzanne confides to Thomas, proving her theory that people hide things.) Thomas also learns from her that warrant officer Robert, even after the promotion he’s due, won’t qualify for bar membership. At one point, Colette needles her husband – teasingly but aware of the effect it will have – by calling him by his Spanish birth name of Roberto. How he gained French citizenship is a matter of dispute between them: Colette says by marrying her, Robert says by joining the national armed forces (presumably via the French Foreign Legion). His personal insecurities complement a sense within the resident French community more largely of vulnerability, of living on borrowed time: General Mathiot voices his regret that ‘the locals are starting to resent us’, that ‘high school pupils won’t learn French’. Campillo develops a picture of military men and military wives who feel on the verge of statelessness. Whereas Odile, from the outset, is miserably homesick for France, Colette and Mme Guedj (she hasn’t a forename) dread the prospect of returning there. After learning that Robert’s Madagascar posting is about to end, a downcast Colette reminds Thomas that the family has already spent time in Algeria, Chad and Morocco. When Thomas suggests they might therefore go to another foreign country next, his mother replies that there’s nowhere left to go.
These feelings crystallise in an extended sequence where the Lopez and Guedj families (the latter couple also has three children), along with Bernard, spend time together on the beach. The island is seen here at its most beautiful, all the more beautiful because the group won’t be there much longer; as Mme Guedj says, ‘They’re closing this holiday camp’. This is another scene vibrant with personal and sexual tensions but the physical setting is luxurious in the sun and the families, kids and adults alike, have fun in the sea. As the light goes and a strong breeze gets up, the atmosphere is more mysteriously charged. You can almost feel Robin Campillo reliving his own past here: his cinematographer, Jeanne Lapoirie, gives the images an uncanny texture – of something you know you experienced but didn’t fully understand as it was happening. As night falls on the beach, a movie is projected on a screen which judders in the wind. It’s too symbolically apt and artful a touch that the film is Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoléon (1927), very rarely screened before its restoration in the late 1970s and which, in any case, is around five hours long! Otherwise, the beach episode is a wonder. Elsewhere, Campillo and Jeanne Lapoirie show Madagascar, through its terrain and rocks, as fully deserving its ‘red island’ label but the landscape is never rendered facilely paradisal.
In a film that’s generally well cast and well played, the Spanish actor Quim Gutiérrez is an especially good choice for his role and gives a superb performance. Gutiérrez perfectly captures the wolfishly handsome Robert’s signal qualities – physically trim, sinewy and self-confident, temperamentally jealous and brittle. Nadia Tereszkiewicz is very right, too, as the softly beautiful Colette: in spite of her controlling husband’s efforts, she’s never browbeaten and always observant – a quality her youngest son has inherited. Campillo’s acute casting enables us to see Thomas’s parents both objectively and through the boy’s eyes – and Charlie Vauselle, skilfully directed, gives unfailingly expressive reactions. Sophie Guillemin and David Serero bring leavening good humour to proceedings. Hugues Delamarlière is touching as the increasingly needy Bernard. Campillo conveys the passage of time over the two years economically but informatively – through occasional remarks, and through Thomas’s cycle rides with Suzanne, which punctuate the narrative. Jumps forward in time are signalled by changes in the children’s clothes or in the colour of the sky in the course of a bike ride. Arnaud Rebotini’s score, sinuous and ominous by turns, always supports the storytelling well.
I was so absorbed by the exploration of family dynamics and their end-of-empire context that I’d have been happy for Red Island to end simply with the main characters leaving Madagascar for an uncertain future. Robin Campillo clearly feels obliged to do more, though. From the start, he intersperses the main narrative with fantasy sequences (too many all told) that feature the dauntless Fantômette (Calissa Oskal-Ool), a junior super-heroine, stories of whom are Thomas’s favourite reading matter[1]. (Suzanne is also a fan.) Thomas is visibly disappointed at the Christmas party when Santa (it’s the military doctor hiding behind the white beard) gives him a cowboy outfit. Once Colette makes Thomas a cape, finds him a mask and gives him her own yellow shirt and a pair of her own black tights, his Fantômette costume is all set to cause a collision between his imaginative and actual lives. I expected his father to take a dim view of his son’s dressing up, let alone dressing up as a female character (albeit Fantômette’s rig out looks pretty gender-neutral). This doesn’t happen but on the family’s last night on the island, when his parents and brothers have all gone to bed, Thomas gets up, creeps out of the house in his Fantômette gear and embarks on one more round of spying on grown-ups.
Bernard and Miangaly are kissing in woodland close to the officers’ mess. Miangaly notices they’re not alone but can’t make out who’s hiding nearby. On Bernard’s insistence, they return to the mess building, where they talk and drink with his Malagasy colleague, Andry (Mitia Ralaivita). Bernard puts a record on; he and Miangaly move together to the film’s plangent, sensuous theme song (performed by Beki Mari), the highlight of Arnaud Rebotini’s original music. Thomas watches through the window and the eyeholes in his Fantômette mask; this time, he gets an uninterrupted view of an impassioned dance. Nervous that Miangaly shouldn’t be on the premises and might be discovered, Andry eventually turns the music off. Bernard, who as usual has drunk too much, falls asleep, his head cradled in Miangaly’s lap. She and Andry chat briefly before she leaves and makes her way back through the wood. This time when she senses someone watching, she calls out and Thomas/Fantômette emerges, a little sheepishly. Miangaly tells him to ‘go home – scram’.
Thomas does as he’s told. Neither he nor any of his family is seen again, their departure from the film and from the island a microcosm of France’s departure from Madagascar. Yet Red Island still has ten minutes to run. As Miangaly walks down a street, a young Malagasy man stops in his truck to ask excitedly if she’s heard the news: a group of activists for full independence have been released from the penal colony where they’d been detained. With hundreds of other islanders, Miangaly makes her way to the airport, where the released prisoners arrive to a hero’s welcome. Until now, the Malagasy community has remained on the margins of the story – the paratroopers and parachute production line, the brothel workers who invade a military control point in protest at soldier clients who leave without paying. Now the locals take over the film entirely, eventually in songs of celebration.
On paper, Campillo’s concluding change of focus makes complete sense; in effect, it throws the film out of joint – and not only because it displaces Thomas. The conversation between Miangaly and Andry, after Bernard has dropped off, supplies a bridge to this finale, Miangaly remarking that it’s always easier to talk once ‘the white guy is asleep’. Yet the switch from an individual French point of view to an impersonal Malagasy one feels like the performance of a liberal-minded duty. At the airport, the released activists give brief speeches, which tell us how long their country has struggled for freedom but belong in a different film. These last sequences are well enough staged, Amely Rakotoarimalala is an eloquent camera subject and the eleventh-hour privileging of an indigenous people’s perspective isn’t self-important in the manner of Killers of the Flower Moon. Even so, it’s relatively perfunctory – an appendage that lacks the complex texture of what has gone before.
This final misjudgment results in anti-climax but hardly detracts from your admiration of the man behind the camera. Campillo has followed up 120 BPM with another substantial and fascinating film. As soon as I got thinking about Red Island after seeing it, I wanted to see it again – so I did. (This is very unusual.) After he and the older boys have deposited the troublesome crocodiles in a lake, Robert Lopez insists on a farewell-to-Madagascar family photograph. It’s another tense moment, one that requires Colette’s persuasive powers and Robert’s firm grip to get and keep Thomas in the picture. He’s dismayed that he’s never going to see Suzanne again. As Colette reasons with him and tells him that the family photograph will be a memory, Thomas retorts that ‘I don’t want memories’. But Robin Campillo has certainly made the most of his.
5 and 13 March 2024
[1] According to Wikipedia: ‘Fantômette is a series of 52 volumes created in 1961 by Georges Chaulet. … Fantômette’s alter ego, Françoise Dupont, is a girl of about twelve years who dresses up in order to fight crime. … Fantômette was the first female superhero in French literature. The Fantômette books were aimed at eight- to twelve-year-old girls. …’