Thomas is a ten-year-old French boy who lives a wonderful life in a military complex in Madagascar in the early 70s. Together with his parents, his two brothers and the neighbors who are in the area, they dance, eat and enjoy the fun. beach in an idyllic place where military families experience the last blows of colonialism.
Robin Campillo, co-writer of The Class and director of 120 Pulsations Per Minute, presented today at the San Sebastián festival La isla rojo, an autobiographical film with which he competes for the Golden Shell. It is a journey around French colonialism told through through the curious, almost voyeuristic gaze of that child, the director’s alter ego. “It was like paradise, a story where we were all children, adults too, but behind the story was the army, there were soldiers. I wanted to reflect that, since as a child I was amazed to see Santa Claus and discover that behind him there was a soldier handing out the gifts,” says the director of Moroccan origin whose military father was “almost Spanish” and who is played in fiction by actor Quim Gutiérrez.
“It’s as if that scene was the expression that colonialism was an illusion behind which there was violence exercised against the people of Madagascar, but also against people like my mother,” he continues. A mother played by the fashionable French actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz with dark hair who goes out of her way to care for her children and who has to put up with the sometimes irascible behavior of her husband.
The film is set in the same place where Campillo lived at that time, specifically in a summer where everyone seems to lead a fairy tale life, oblivious to the problems of the island’s inhabitants. “We were so very French,” says Campillo, who toured all the French colonies with his family. “The first time I went to the cinema with my mother I was six months old, we saw a lot of French films in Morocco, it was the way to stay connected with the country.”
The film also plays with fantastic elements, such as Thomas’s obsession with Fantômette, the intrepid heroine of a comic from the seventies. In this regard, the director remembers that his mother sewed him the costume and he did not take it off even to sleep. “The boy has a fantasy of France, he has never been there,” he says.
The little boy’s costume has a mask, and that mask is the one worn by most of the characters who parade before the viewer, as if they were hiding something. Thomas’s friend warns him at one point, when they must leave the complex and all the beauty of the place. “There are strange people who hide things. They are the type of people who are never suspicious.”
And the fact is that, in some way, all the relationships that are observed on the screen are marked by a process of domination. The family ones, like the one that occupies Thomas’s environment, and the racial ones, with that contempt for the prostitutes whom the military does not pay or cajole to invite them to leave the island and travel with them to France. Only the youngest ones seem to escape this subjection.
Beyond a splendid photograph and the tour of beautiful landscapes, the oppression against the people of Madagascar, which achieved independence from France in 1960 but was still under its rule 12 years later, is also present, although it is “hidden, behind the curtain”, breaking into the final part of the story.
Gutiérrez, for his part, highlights Campillo’s perfectionism during filming. “It’s very precise, although it was exhausting” and the abundant information he gave them about his characters. Regarding his role, Robert, he admits that he “loves the children, but he can become violent and he also loves her wife, but he doesn’t treat her well.” For the cultural moment, he had to behave like an “alpha male and defend himself with his fists.” However, he points out that “he is a character who also wants to have fun.” The Red Island will land in Spanish cinemas on October 20.
