In La Gradiva, her first feature film, Marine Atlan takes a class of high school students from Montrouge on a vibrant and fragile journey through Naples. By borrowing its title from the enigmatic figure in Wilhelm Jensen’s novella, the film explores the shifting boundary between invented narrative, idealization, and reality.
With La Gradiva, her first feature film, Marine Atlan transports a group of high school students from Montrouge into the streets of Naples, between discovery of the city and teenage tensions. Awarded the Grand Prize of the Semaine de la Critique, the film intertwines the aspirations of a moving youth with a narrative inspired by a literary figure associated with desire and the imaginary. Behind this school escapade, it explores the fragility of the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives.
The title of the film refers to a novella by Wilhelm Jensen, published at the end of the 19th century and made famous by Sigmund Freud’s study of it. Gradiva, a mysterious figure emerging from an ancient bas-relief, fuels the projections of an archaeologist who believes he recognizes a real woman in her. This literary origin illuminates the film without dictating its plot: Atlan is primarily interested in the uncertain boundary between the dreamed ideal and concrete experience.
In Naples, this boundary takes on an almost physical dimension. The city bears the traces of ancient catastrophes and seems to always anticipate the next tremor, while the adolescents navigate their own upheavals. The reference to Gradiva thus becomes an invitation to observe how each person crafts their narratives, clings to images, and attempts to align them with reality.
Naples, a vibrant backdrop for a school trip
The class arrives in a city that the film portrays as both splendid and disorderly. The streets, historical sites, and collective movements give the stay a nervous energy. On screen, the students appear constantly on the verge of overflowing the frame.
The trip reveals as much about the places visited as it does about the relationships that are reshaped among the young people. Sometimes, a glance alone is enough to shift an alliance, a joke becomes a provocation, and established positions unravel without warning. Nothing remains still, neither in bodies nor in power dynamics.
This agitation recalls the instability of a territory marked by tremors and ruins. The visits notably evoke Pompeii, buried under ashes, but the film does not reduce history to a mere lesson. Instead, it resonates the ancient catastrophe with present anxieties, without confusing the two eras.
A group portrait shaped by observation
Before shooting, the team spent two years observing school outings, conducting interviews, and working with improvisations. This preparation time imparts remarkable spontaneity to the exchanges. Conversations sometimes seem to arise around a corner or during a walk, filled with hesitations, bravado, and silences.
The film reveals the labels circulating within a classroom: the attractive one, the slacker, the exemplary student, or the solitary artist. The girls, too, are caught in harsh judgments, categorized according to the perceptions of others. Yet, these references never become definitive boxes. The characters escape archetypes because their attitudes change and their contradictions persist.
The collective movement is one of the great strengths of the narrative. The staging shifts from one character to another, without designating a single center around which everyone should gravitate. Roles are exchanged, affinities shift, and bodies compose a lively circle of words, desires, and rivalries.
Amidst this tumult, the Latin teacher tries to maintain a form of structure. Antonia Buresi imbues her with a fierce intensity, made of authority, fatigue, and attentiveness. Her gaze toward the students evolves over the course of the trip, just as the way they perceive her does. The pedagogical relationship transforms into a shifting confrontation where each tests the limits of the other.
Adolescents between assigned roles and transformations
Tony and James form the sensitive core of the story. Colas Quignard and Mitia Capellier imbue their friendship with a delicate presence, built through exchanges and shared habits. Their complicity initially seems to offer refuge amid the general din.
The bond between the two boys also rests on a family story recounted during the journey to Italy. Tony evokes a familial legend surrounding his grandmother, and James accompanies him in this invention. The shared narrative draws them closer together, but it already bears a fragility that the trip will ultimately expose.
Suzanne occupies a different position. An art student, not drawn to groups, she observes events from the periphery. Suzanne Gerin lends her a quiet gravitas, without reducing her to a mere spectator. Her distance becomes a unique way of understanding what is unfolding, while the disorder takes on a tragic magnitude.
Invented stories in the face of catastrophe
The catastrophe runs through the film long before it takes a precise form. It is etched in the Neapolitan landscape, in the memory of Pompeii, and in the class’s nervousness. Atlan lingers less on the historical events themselves than on how they are transmitted and transformed into narratives.
A family legend can protect, unite, or give an appearance of coherence to the past. But the film also reveals the risk of believing too firmly in a fabricated story. When the origin narrative is deconstructed brutally, Tony and James’s friendship finds itself exposed to a painful trial.
The reference to Jensen’s novella takes on a particular resonance here. As in this work, imagination shapes a figure from fragments of reality, desire, and memory. The viewer is invited to examine the images to which the characters cling, without receiving a simple answer regarding the truth they contain.
In this light, Gradiva is not merely a name laden with literary history. It evokes the power of projections: we ascribe intentions to others, we idealize certain memories, and we sometimes construct versions of the past capable of reassuring us. Naples becomes the place where these constructions encounter the resistance of the world, with an intensity that leaves little room for illusion.
Suzanne, witness to a collective tragedy
As the story progresses, Suzanne becomes a privileged point of observation. Her peripheral position allows her to perceive shifts in tone and lines of fracture. Her gaze gradually gathers the group, making the adolescents sound like an ancient chorus.
A choral form close to upheavals
The narration refuses to hierarchy its characters for long. It circulates from one presence to another, attentive to gestures as well as words. This choral structure embraces the mobility of adolescence, a period when one tries on roles before knowing which truly belongs to them.
The film also draws its strength from its balance between observation and composition. The situations maintain a sense of freedom but are organized around progressively escalating tensions. The camera accompanies movements without transforming the young people into objects of study. It allows their gestures the time to reveal what they do not yet know how to articulate.
The perspective on the teacher contributes to this circulation. She is neither an external figure to the group nor an immutable authority: her presence is redefined in interaction with her students. In return, they appear differently according to the connections they establish and the narratives they choose to believe.
Released in theaters on October 21, this color feature lasts 145 minutes. Its duration allows the exchanges and movements to unfold without rushing the transformations of the group. Throughout the trip, conversations, silences, and the tremors of the narrative continue to shift the boundary between what the adolescents imagine and what they discover.
By associating a literary reference with a contemporary chronicle, Marine Atlan gives her first film multiple layers of meaning. The myth does not serve as mere ornament: it engages in dialogue with singular characters, their friendships, and their intimate fictions. In the changing light of Naples, these stories intersect as the class continues its journey.
La Gradiva, between myth and reality
In revisiting La Gradiva, the enigmatic figure born from literature, Marine Atlan does not simply give a new face to an ancient narrative. She displaces its mysteries to a class of high school students traveling in Naples, a city where ruins, legends, and present tremors seem to coexist. The past never remains motionless here: it mingles with the stories the adolescents invent, transmit, or choose to believe.
This tension between fiction and reality permeates the film like an underground wave. Tony and James share a family narrative that nourishes their friendship and shapes their view of the world. But when this story wavers, their bond is also put to the test. Through this fragility, Atlan questions the power of narratives: they can protect, bring closer, but also construct illusions whose collapse leaves scars.
The director inscribes this tragedy within the collective movement of an unstable and vibrant adolescence. Roles recombine, perspectives shift, and both the teacher and students see their certainties shaken. At the heart of this circle, Suzanne observes without fusing into it. Her discreet attention gradually becomes the thread that connects events and gives them an almost choral resonance.
Naples, with Pompeii in memory, offers this group a landscape where catastrophe always seems possible but never entirely predictable. The reference to Wilhelm Jensen and Freud’s reading surfaces without confining the film to explanation. It rather opens a space for interpretation, between idealization, desire, and truth. Thus, Marine Atlan transforms Gradiva into a shifting presence: an enigma that traverses generations and reminds that each person moves among the ruins of their own fictions, searching for what, in their memories, belongs to the real.
