Criticism of ‘La gran juventud’ with Louis Garrel, an emotional torrent for theater fans

Luck of Fame for Theater Addicts by Bernard-Marie Koltès, ‘The great youth’ comes to sublimate the style of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. The autobiographical breath once again raises the temperature of a story inspired by the experiences of the actress and filmmaker at the school of the Théâtre des Amandiers by Patrice Chéreau. A story in which exhibitionism, cyclothymia, the overflow of the gesture, the very theatricality of life model a staging that makes arrhythmia and arterial hypertension its raison d’être. Set in the wild 80s, the film exudes an energy that eschews nostalgia, even though the specter of AIDS, drug use and pre-#MeToo sex haunt its images. That energy, pouring out with exhausting ferocity, seems to infect all the scenes equally, as if there were hardly any difference between the auditions that open the film, the rehearsals for Chekhov’s Platonov, the students’ interactions with Chéreau (a Louis Garrel something past turns) and his own life offstage.

In this festival of runaway emotions, which sometimes he seems to look at himself in the deformed mirror of the Cassavetes cinema (more in ‘Faces’ than in ‘Opening Night’), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi never seeks a balance. Perhaps part of the film’s charm comes from how easy it is for her to be empathetic and irritating at the same time. We appreciate the ruthlessness of Chéreau’s portrait, though we frown at a certain self-indulgence in Stella’s (notable Nadia Tereszkiewicz), alter ego of the filmmaker, another representative of the culture of privilege who cries, complains, cracks inside, while her classmates break their hearts to pay for their courses. His toxic relationship with a drug-addicted student monopolizes the final part, blurring what, until now, had been a powerful choral vindication of theater as a way of life, or what is the same, of life as a play in which We will die improvising.

For theater fans, on and off stage

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Data sheet

Address: Valeria Bruni Distribution: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Sofiane Bennacer, Louis Garrel, Micha Lescot. Country: France Year: 2022 Release date: 5-19-2023 Gender: Dramatic comedy Script: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky, Agnès de Sacy Duration: 126 min.

Synopsis: At the end of the 1980s, Stella, Victor, Adèle and Etienne are 20 years old and take the entrance exam to the famous acting school created by Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Together they will experience this crucial moment in their lives, but also their first great tragedies.