Director: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (France, Italy). Year of Release: 2022
Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, the mid 1980s. A corridor full of hopefuls wait in line for auditions to be accepted as students in the theatre. The first that we see is Stella, a young blonde woman who histrionically declaims a scene from Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute”, ending with her ripping open her blouse and finishing the scene with dangling breasts. When she is done, one of the row of admissions tutors asks her: “Do you think an actress has to be an exhibitionist?”
Stella rushes in tears to the toilets, convinced that she has fucked up. As she stares at her running mascara, she meets Adèle, a red-headed woman who is using the next mirror to put on make up. Stella confesses to Adèle she’s not sure if she was any good (to be honest, neither am I), with Adèle reassuring her that if she feels embarrassed she must have made an impact. Adèle then lifts her skirt to show she’s wearing no knickers and farts.
As the auditions continue, we view the candidates who we will be following for the rest of the film. As well as Stella and Adèle, there’s the pregnant one, the 19-year old married one, the lesbian, and many more who fail so far to stick in our brains. But we do notice Étienne, the broody one with a beard and mother issues. Étienne’s job is to look surly and to wander round Campus wearing a long, brown coat and a permanent scowl.
Initially 40 students are accepted, who are to be whittled down to 12. Adèle mime a pistol with her fingers taking them out. A list of the names of the lucky 12 is taped to the front of the theatre. The candidates gather and either celebrate or say they never wanted to study there in the first place, according to whether their name is on the list. We’re reminded that these are teenagers and kids in their early 20s. Their lack of insight or depth is palpable.
The successful 12 are whisked off to the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. Lessons consist of them walking around a room expressing emotions – a process which was satirised in The Tall Guy and the tv series of the Buddha of Suburbia, but is taken awfully seriously here. There’s a lot of talk about Stanislavski and The Method, but very little of anyone actually learning anything or having any ideas at all.
Meanwhile, Étienne comes on to Stella, saying that if she doesn’t kiss him, he’ll kill himself. Instead of telling him to stop being such a dick, she is intrigued. When Étienne skips classes, Stella finds him trying to score some heroin, even stumping up the money when he doesn’t have enough. Étienne warns Stella that he’s mentally ill and she should stay away from him, which is just the sort of preudy thing he’d say and that she’d ignore. A romance ensues and Étienne soon moves in.
This is bad news for Adèle – and, indirectly, for the audience. Until now, Adèle has been by far the most interesting person in the film, but as the relationship between Stella and Étienne develops, Adèle is increasingly excluded from both her relationship with Stella and much screen time. With Adèle out of the way, we’re largely left in the company of self-promoting egomaniacs who barely have an interesting opinion between them. It gets very difficult to care about what happens.
This is not for a lack of stuff happening – off screen at least. There are 2 births and an abortion, an unseen partner gets AIDS, causing pretty much everyone to panic, as they’ve all slept with each other at least once with. And yet the panic abruptly subsides, as do the reactions to all the other problems. The characters are too busy rushing through their carefree lives to actually worry about anything. These are soap opera tragedies – briefly catastrophic but quickly forgotten.
To show the distance of the main characters from reality as most people experience it, an early scene has Stella taking advice from her butler. Stella’s immense wealth is barely mentioned – indeed when Étienne does mention it in passing, this is shown as evidence of his insensitivity. Stella is, by the way, based on director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. I don’t know how privileged her upringing was, but she is very keen to dismiss as distasteful any criticism of her alter ego’s wealth.
Some other stuff does happen on screen. One of their lecturers takes heroin and falls asleep in class, the other is a coke fiend. A car full of students run through red lights, and Étienne has an overdose in the toilet of a very plush bar, even though he has insisted that he can stop any time. Who’d have expected that? Each of these incidents is presumably a signifier of the wildness of youth, but they come across as uninteresting people thinking way too highly of themselves.
Meanwhile, the students are rehearsing Platanov – an early Chekhov piece about the impetuousness and fickleness of youth. Yet, for a film about Art which starts by asking each candidate “Why Theatre?”, Forever Young has little to say about the creative process. It comes closest in a speech by one of the lecturers, who berates the class for not caring enough. He screams at them that the audience has come to watch actors trying hard.
May I beg to differ? Unless I’m watching a Brechtian piece which is deliberately drawing attention to the way in which it was made, I watch plays to see the characters and plot, not the self-absorbed actors. If I notice that the actors are trying, they are not doing their job properly. Which makes it apt that this film has little character development, with things happening to uninteresting people who seem to lack any outside interests. That is until they stop happening.
If that’s the sort of thing you’d like to see, be my guest. But, like its characters, I found Forever Young to be mainly vacuous and dull. Apart from that, it was ok I guess.
CinePhil 