Like Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Robin Campillo’s Red Island (L’île rouge) weaves childhood memories into a beautiful tapestry of emerging identity and social change. Red Island (L’île rouge) is now showing in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
Throughout our lives, memories are stored as collections of colourful polaroids, short films that play on a loop, smells, tastes and powerful emotions and feelings. These memories are never more powerful than during childhood. As our young minds grow and new experiences build into a patchwork of understanding, confusion, fear and joy, these memories find a deep, eternal place in our soul, emerging at random moments in adulthood, often when we least expect them.
When a director chooses to use these memories as the foundation of a film, they share a part of themselves with us, opening up their most profound childhood experiences for all to see in the hope that they will also spark something deep inside us. Robin Campillo (120 BPM) achieves just that in his beautiful tapestry of memories, Red Island (L’île rouge), as he takes us back to his childhood growing up on a French army base in 1970s Madagascar as full independence from France loomed.
Eight-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) is an imaginative boy who likes reading about his favourite superhero, Fantômette, and eavesdropping on the adult world around him, a world that is alluring, confusing and male-dominated. His brothers are all older than he, and his parents, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) and Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), are loving but often distant, as if they have their own uncertainties and fears bubbling below the surface of their marriage.
Meanwhile, his best friend, Suzanne (Cathy Pham), seems to understand the adult world better than him; she is knowing, confident and assured, taking him to the bamboo lovers wood, where teenagers kiss in secret while recounting stories of the senior officer’s mess, a place Thomas’ dad isn’t allowed to visit due to his lower rank. Thomas and Suzanne don’t fully understand the changing world around them. Still, it’s clear that the adult world is shifting and morphing into something new as Madagascar shakes off the shackles of colonial rule, relationships falter, and the sun begins to set on the base they call home.
One young couple on the base fascinate Suzanne and Thomas, Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière) and Odile (Luna Carpiaux). Odile isn’t happy in Madagascar, and it’s not long before she leaves Bernard. Following this, Bernard starts to date a young Malagasy woman, Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), which is strictly taboo on the base.
Like Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Robin Campillo’s Red Island (L’île rouge) weaves childhood memories into a beautiful tapestry of emerging identity and social change. From a scene of Thomas pouring sand onto his mother’s hand, covering the ring he brought her, to a beach film screening of a silent movie where the stars twinkle and the palm trees sway behind the images on the screen, or Thomas watching adults party through an opaque pane of glass, Campillo’s patchwork of memories is stunning in both cinematography, performance and sound design. Each perfectly framed scene is a window into a childhood of sun, sand, long summer nights, imagination, and a growing sense of something changing, internally and externally.
Thomas knows he is different from his father, his brothers, and the male role models around him; he escapes into his imagination through his female comic book hero, Fantômette, whom he wants to be, as only in her company can he breathe in his creativity and difference. Like him, Madagascar can’t breathe under French control, and like him, the masculine grip of colonialism stifles individuality and change. Red Island (L’île rouge) is a dreamlike, beautiful, stylistically bold coming-of-age journey for both a boy and a country, a mesmeric voyage into memory, decolonisation and a gently emerging self-identity.
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