‘Wild Diamond’ Review: Agathe Riedinger’s Debut Empathetically Tracks A Young Woman’s Desperate Pursuit Of Fame – Cannes Film Festival
15.05.2024 - 16:59
/ deadline.com
“Hater says I’m superficial,” muses one of the TikTok influencers who rule the version of the world that obsesses 19-year-old Liane in Agathe Riedinger’s Cannes Competition entry Wild Diamond (Diamant Brut). “Yes, I’m superficial,” continues the influencer, “but that doesn’t mean I’m a moron.”
Maybe not, but there aren’t many prospects for young women like her fan Liane (Malou Khebizi), whose adeptness at facial contouring, applying diamantés to her towering shoes and blowing kisses to her 50,000-and-counting followers are not generally regarded as marketable skills. Not in the old-school versions of the world, anyway; she can see that her middle-aged career counsellor, for all that she is worn down by Liane’s tantrums, pities her.
Liane doesn’t see things that way. For her, being beautiful – her kind of beautiful, read: hot — is her future. It makes people look at her. They may look askance at her tight clothes and surgically mangled flesh. They may leer at her, if they’re men, then call her a slut when she doesn’t respond. But at least they’re looking, which means she’s not nothing. And if she succeeds in her audition for a reality TV show called Miracle Island – because she is, indeed, waiting for a miracle to change her nothing life – her beauty will become a career. She knows it is probably the only career open to her, when it comes to it. She’s not a moron.
Riedinger’s debut feature approaches her subject with remarkable empathy, taking Liane on her own terms and seeing her surroundings largely through her eyes. Khebizi, a non-professional actress from the southern French region where Liane lives, clearly understands Liane’s awkward mix of childishness and assertiveness. Liane is a muddle of motivations that
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