‘Astrakan’: Locarno Review

Dir/scr: David Depesseville. France. 2022. 105 mins.

The cinema year never lacks promising debuts from French writer-directors nor sensitive coming-of-age tales; a film which stands out from both packs is a rare find. David Depesseville’s Astrakan is one such: for most of its length a sober, elliptically observational study of a smart, wayward teenager in foster care, which takes an unexpected formal left turn in its final minutes.

An engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected

Premiering in the competitive Cineasti del Presente section at Locarno and built around an excellent performance by teen newcomer Mirko Giannini, this rural-set character study is an accomplished effort for Depesseville nearly a decade after his little-seen mid-lengther La derniere plaine (2013). Further festival play is amply deserved and likely, although theatrically this angular miniature has dim prospects outside French-speaking territories.

The presence in a prominent supporting role of acclaimed musician and occasional actress Jehnny Beth (Cesar-nominated for An Impossible Love [2018] and recently seen in Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District) will doubtless generate helpful attention in France. She is a sympathetic presence as Marie, who with husband Clement (Bastien Bouillon) takes in foster children for reasons which she freely admits are more pecuniary than altruistic.



Their latest ward is Samuel (Giannini), who looks about 13 and comes from a very tough background. His father was killed by the police, and when Marie and Clement are casually asked about the fate of his mother, their response is a stony and heavily pregnant silence. Samuel lives with but has little contact with Marie and Clement’s two children, instead spending most of his time wandering the nearby countryside or getting to know Helene (Lorine Delin), a neighbour of similar age.

A talented gymnast, Samuel is afflicted by emotional and psychological problems which manifest themselves physiologically in the form of withholding bowel movements.

 Clearly a kid at a crossroads who could either progress towards well-balanced maturity or go crashing off the rails, Samuel is rather too much for the hot-headed Clement to handle. The mild-mannered foster father is prone to violent reactions, including one instance of corporal punishment so severe it leaves Samuel with visible bruising. 



While far from an anti-fostering tract, Astrakan does stand as an implicit indictment of how the fostering system operates in France: on this evidence, the state seems to abandon its charges to surrogate parents without proper checks and supervision. Samuel has little redress and no obvious escape route, and when his misbehaviour becomes too much he is temporarily exiled to the farmhouse of Marie’s devoutly Catholic parents a few kilometres away.

Here danger lurks in the imposing form of Marie’s brother Luc (Theo Costa-Marini), an adult with some form of learning difficulties and clandestine paedophilic tendencies. Samuel ends up having to share a bed with Luc, but the film is deliberately vague about what transpires as a result. Some may find this ambiguity frustrating, but Depesseville deserves credit for his refusal to fill in every detail: he places us in Samuel’s shoes as the lad struggles to navigate the tricky and often contradictory world of adults.

Using simple and direct means, Depesseville and his collaborators achieve a genuine intensity of sympathetic identification towards their tough but vulnerable protagonist. Comparisons with two landmark French debuts — Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Maurice Pialat’s Naked Childhood (1968), the latter also focused on a foster child — are hard to avoid, but it is somehow not entirely absurd to speak of Depesseville’s unsentimental-yet-touching debut in the context of such illustrious company.



What inexperience he has is amply offset by the support of seasoned collaborators in the areas of cinematography and editing — Simon Beaufils and Martial Solomon have more than 100 credits between them. The result is an engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected; the various sections of the film are divided by ruminative fades to black.

Having established his skills and careful competence over 90-odd minutes, Depesseville then elects to showcase different facets of his talent in what amounts to an extended, dreamlike, impressionistic coda which revisits certain key moments and images from the main body of the picture. Accompanied by a version of Bach’s ’Agnus Dei’ played unusually loud in the sound mix, this section finally solves the mystery of the film’s title via the appearance of a black lamb, presumably of the Astrakan variety.

The symbolic nature of this creature is evident, Samuel being a young “black sheep” in need of careful nurturing. The metaphor is far from subtle, but fits with the controlled, operatic intensity of these closing moments — this quietly virtuosic final montage an intriguing stylistic signpost towards where Depesseville may next choose to head.