Barely a decade out of film school, Gallic twins Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma are primed for an international splash once their fourth feature, “And Their Children After Them,” premieres in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Adapted from a literary sensation that won the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize, the film explores teenage heartache and working-class doldrums with a novelistic sweep, playing as a coming-of-age power ballad full of operatic emotions and chart-topping tunes.
“We wanted to turn a story made up of fairly ordinary, small conflicts into something vast and cinematic,” says director Zoran Boukherma, who co-wrote with his brother Ludovic after actor-filmmaker Gilles Lellouche handed each of them a copy of the book over lunch two years ago.
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“That idea stemmed from our discussion with Gilles and with original author Nicolas Mathieu, who recognized that a very small event could lead to an entire family’s downfall. The book explores the tragedy of ordinary people and the romance of everyday life, and we needed to do the same on a cinematic scaler,” says Ludovic Boukherma.
Lellouche, who stars in “And Their Children After Them,” initially approached the Boukherma brothers to write a series based on the book, but ultimately let them take over the project and turn it into a movie after he decided to focus on his own movie “Beating Hearts” which competed at this year’s Cannes.
To tackle their biggest project to date, the director duo worked with French blockbuster producers, Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi (a Mediawan banner) and Alain Attal and Les Films du Tresor, who also produced Lellouche’s epic love story “Beating Hearts.”
Told over the course of four summers, the story follows Anthony (Paul Kircher, breakout star of “The Animal Kingdom”) as he matures from a gangly dreamer in the dog days of 1992 to self-assured young man on the eve of France’s World Cup victory in 1998.
As should come with little surprise, his path is filled with yearning and strife, from an almost-unrequited romantic obsession with the more affluent Steph (Angelina Woreth, of recent Director’s Fortnight winner “This Life of Mine”), to a rivalry with the Moroccan-born Hacine (“Oussekine” lead Sayyid El Alami) that grows more violent over time.
Without sugarcoating the story’s tough social setting – often tracking the ways economic precarity can curdle into substance abuse or outright xenophobia in a region that remains a hotbed for the far right – the filmmakers veered away from the social-realist approach common to politically minded festival fare.
“The book is about all of France,” says director Ludovic Boukherma. “So the film needed to be equally accessible. We wanted to move away from naturalism, and didn’t go for that raw, hand-held style. Instead, we went for something a little more generous, something closer to New Hollywood – offering the film to those whom we depict by making it more universal.” In doing so, Zoran Boukherma says they felt that they were making the film more accessible and more generous so that everyone, including people whom they depict in the film, would enjoy it.
The 30-something directors broke onto the scene with a pair of horror comedies that evoked video-store perennials like “An American Werewolf in London” and “Jaws” from within a more rural French milieu.
“The book spoke to us so much,” says Zoran, who grew up in a small rural town Southwestern France. “It resonated with our own adolescence that, in the end, we thought that by adapting Nicolas Mathieu’s text we could make our most personal film. The summer boredom, the working-class milieu, the love for an elusive girl – that all could have come from our lives.”
Kircher, a rising star who earned Cesar nominations for his performances in Thomas Cailley’s “Animal Kingdom” and Christophe Honoré’s “Winter Boy,” also brought vulnerability to the character of Anthony, depicted as a “bit of a brawler” in the book, say the directors. Kircher, who worked with a choreographer so that he could portray Anthony from the age of 14 to 20, exudes “something a bit wobbly” that make his character “a bit touching,” says Ludovic.
The filmmakers took their greatest liberty with Anthony’s father, Patrick (played by Lellouche), who struggles with alcoholism. Whereas the book cast the father as more of a racist and a brute, Lellouche — no doubt exhausted after arriving on set just hours after wrapping “Beating Hearts” — played up the character’s world weariness instead.
“We thought he might be violent, but mostly towards himself ,” Zoran explains. “He’s a gentler character. His alcoholism tells us that he’s a broken person, not someone who hurts others. Maybe, unconsciously, we put a bit of our parents into these characters too.”
Starring as Steph, Anthony’s first love, Worethwas “exactly the Steph he and Ludovic imagined when they read the book, quite simply.” “When we confronted her with Paul and got them to play together, there was something in their relationship that worked right away,” says Zoran, adding that she was “more assured,” while Anthony was more “clumsy.”
The classic-rock soundtrack also underscores the story’s universal hook. While needle drops from Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and none other than Bruce Springsteen might cost a pretty penny, the filmmakers say they had “carte-blanche” when assembling the most period appropriate soundtrack.
That is, with one notable exception.
“We could not get ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” says Ludovic. “Nirvana doesn’t sell their rights, so it’s really impossible to get a song. I think the most recent Batman got one, but they paid $5 million!”The filmmakers still made the most of their mixtape, choreographing whole sequences to the classic rock playing live on set and pushing the actors to perform in tune, for instance during a pool scene with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” playing in the background.
“Doing so created an emotion that simply wouldn’t have been there without the music,” says Zoran. “It created something real.”
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