‘Forever Young’ Film Review: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Semi-Autobiographical Tale Is Painfully Familiar
23.05.2022 - 02:17
/ thewrap.com
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” is a fictionalised account of her time at Les Amandiers, a prestigious acting school in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris. As well as drawing on her own memories of student-dom in the mid-1980s, she and her co-writers, Noémie Nvovsky and Agnes De Sacy, interviewed other people who studied alongside her, and so their tragedy-tinged comedy drama, which is in Competition at Cannes, should have all the unruly specificity of real life.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.
If you’ve ever seen a film about performing arts students – the sort of people who are going to live forever and who are going to learn how to fly (high) – then you’ll have seen it all before.Like all of said films, “Forever Young” begins with audition scenes – and it does have some fun sequences in which the histrionic would-be thesps bare their souls (and in one case, breasts) for the amused grown-ups. Then comes the scene in which the hopefuls learn which of them have been accepted as students, and which of them declare that they didn’t want to go to Les Amandiers, anyway.
And then it’s time to cut between bog-standard rehearsals and personal traumas as the students get to work on the end-of-term show – Chekhov’s “Platonov” – which will conclude the film.And, boy, there are personal traumas. In fact, the characters don’t have much else except personal traumas.
There are 12 students in the class, the central one being Stella (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), whom Bruni Tedeschi says is based on her. You
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