An attentive mother (Sandrine Kiberlain) intervenes unwittingly in her son’s passionate feud with another boy in this intimate, engrossing and original coming-of-age drama set in the spectacular Pyrenees.
Class, race, sexuality, experience and ambition all come into play in this sensitive, sometimes surprising study of adolescent upheaval.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2016
Being 17 2016
Quand on a 17 ans
André Téchiné’s engrossing and original drama of teenage male turmoil is enriched immeasurably by its assured inclusion of female perspective, thanks to a script co-written by Céline Sciamma (Girlhood, NZIFF15) and an inspired performance from Sandrine Kiberlain. In her most substantial role in years, Kiberlain plays a mother who unwittingly comes between her son (a mercurial Kacey Mottet Klein) and the classmate who embodies everything he thinks he loathes.
High in the spectacular Pyrenees, Marianne (Kiberlain), the local doctor, is called out to an isolated farm to tend to an ailing woman. She takes an instant liking to Thomas (Corentin Fila), her patient’s adopted son, a handsome young North African whose easy masculine competence impresses her. When the boy’s mother is admitted to hospital, Marianne invites Thomas to stay in town, near the hospital, with her and her son, his tauntingly brainy classmate Damien. She’s unaware of the longstanding antagonism between the two. Soon she is confronting the most outrageous flare-ups, and trying to unpick the insecurities that fuel their passionate hostility.
“As a portrait of adolescents wrestling with unfamiliar emotions, this is an uncommonly moving teen film, conveying with great restraint the boys’ loneliness, fear, longing and magnetic attraction in moments so tender and private you almost feel like an intruder… Kiberlain manages the tricky feat of making the perfect mother unquestionably real and relatable. Her performance can’t be over-praised.” — David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter