La Gradiva

Marine Atlan invites anachronism in her feature debut La Gradiva, a luminous coming-of-age film whose contemporary high-school setting seems haunted by older images. Its teenagers worry over university placements with the volatility of adolescence. Yet the film’s grainy texture and mythological fixations make it feel strangely out of time. Pompeii completes that displacement, turning adolescent confusion into something preserved under ash.

The premise suggests a familiar school-trip drama, with students briefly loosened from home while teachers try to keep order as desire disturbs the itinerary. Atlan pushes the film toward something more haunted. Pompeii becomes a place where fantasy is tested against historical violence, and where looking too closely can break the story one came to preserve.

At the centre is Toni (Colas Quignard), a troubled and misunderstood student whose presence unsettles the class before his private crisis comes into focus. Around him, adolescent life flickers in sharp, ordinary fragments. Class tensions harden. Hotel corridors become spaces of furtive intimacy. The comedy of wanting too much from someone who does not want you back turns cruel. Toni’s unrequited desire for his best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) has the painful grandeur of first love, while his use of Grindr roots that longing in the awkwardness of contemporary queer adolescence.

Toni has also come to Italy chasing another fantasy. A family legend links his maternal grandmother to the aristocratic Montorsi family. He believes there was a romance, a noble lineage and a house destroyed in the 1980 Irpinia earthquake. What he finds is devastating. The villa still stands. The imagined inheritance becomes a story of violence and exile. Toni’s coming-of-age is the shattering of the story that made his place in the world feel bearable.

The title reaches back to Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, the novella Freud later read as a story of desire and buried memory. Its protagonist is an archaeologist who becomes obsessed with the image of a walking woman carved in relief, then imagines her as a woman from Pompeii. Atlan echoes that movement through Toni, who arrives in Italy chasing his own inherited image of the past. His excavation does not confirm the family myth. It destroys it.

Atlan is especially sensitive to the gap between looking and knowing. The students gaze at the Dionysiac frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries, receiving mythology as a lesson, while Toni undergoes a harsher initiation of his own. Shot digitally with a grainy, underexposed tactility, La Gradiva often feels like an image pulled from ash, warm and wounded.

Its symbolism can occasionally feel emphatic, though Atlan’s feeling for adolescent shame keeps the film alive. La Gradiva understands that myths rarely break cleanly. They leave fragments behind, and young people cut themselves on them.

Reviewed on: 10 Jul 2026