Goodbye Cruel World

Bluesky

Goodbye Cruel World opens with a breathtaking shot of blurry lights against a dark, French sky. The exact lightsource is hard to pinpoint – it might be a highway, a bridge, or maybe an airport runway. That sense of uncertainty haunts the entire movie, which is very content to sit in ambiguity. First-time director Félix de Givry invites us to experience the convoluted world of teenage malaise through impressions and feelings, the rational and structured coming out rarely, only in a stranger’s gentle guiding voice.

Relentlessly bullied 14-year-old Otto (Milo Machado-Graner) wants to die. His scrawny build and tired eyes evoke the heroes of Truffaut or Bellocchio. But Machado-Graner brings out a certain dissociative flair in his character. Even when the suicide attempt fails, it’s as if Otto were dead. A guinea pig, his only friend, left to fend for itself somewhere in the forest, an entire town convinced he’s gone after reading meticulously mailed suicide notes. The only one who knows about his survival is Léna (Jane Beever), who takes him into an abandoned room in her mother’s hotel. The two bond and live in happy secrecy until Otto’s depressive wanderlust starts being contagious.

The suicide attempt is as much of a cry for help, as a manifestation of the desire to control the narrative. Otto reads newspaper eulogies compulsively, finding the illusion of a “shy but dearly beloved boy” comforting. This becomes further apparent in the voiceover, where his painful self- narration competes with that of a calm, almost didactic, older narrator. As for Lena, the more in love she falls, the more she wants to change her name and run away; to “be whoever she wants and wherever she wants to be”.

The screenplay, co-written by Marie-Stéphane Imbert, avoids the details of Otto’s gruesome past, exploring its consequences instead. Focus on the present also comes out in Tara-Jay Bangalter’s stunning camerawork, perhaps the film’s best asset. Filmstock works as a mediator – images, minimal but stylish with their overpronounced grain and creative use of lighting, manage to capture warmth between the teenagers in the otherwise distanced contemporary world.

De Givry’s love of ambiguity often approaches the danger zone of unwillingness to commit. Before ideas can be realised fully, they are dropped in the pursuit of romance, or lost in the ending that’s built out of mismatched prefabricates. What had the chance to appear grand becomes banal. It’s just like the elements of child’s play in the movie. At first, knocking codes and scarves turned into tin-can phones are used not as infantile frolics but as conspiratorial means of communication, further cementing the theme of recontextualizing a narrative. But as time progresses, their relevance fades, leaving behind not even an afterthought.

Goodbye Cruel World, which premiered in Cannes and is playing in competition at Warsaw Film Festival, shifts the focus of a traditional “lost child” storyline from the despairing adults to the often-forgotten kids, who never received any love or attention before disappearing.

It does so with a fair share of sympathy. However, for a movie about the dangers of losing yourself in a trauma-induced fantasy, this French debut remains surprisingly safe.

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