The crusade puts us in the shoes of our children – Francesco Boille

He arrived in the room The crusade, the new film by director and actor Louis Garrel, presented at the last Cannes Film Festival and at the Rome Film Festival. The title is pompous, perhaps high-sounding, especially in view of its short duration, its lightness, its humor. And to his humility. But it nevertheless centers, with almost surgical precision, most of the sub-themes linked to the central theme: climate warming.

And the talent in cinematographic writing is equally remarkable in combining not only the tones of comedy with those of intimate cinema – almost a French cinematic “genre”, to which the two previous feature films directed by Garrel belong – but also in overturning the same characteristics of those tones, in a beautiful photograph of the thinking and acting of children or, at most, of those who are ending their adolescence. With panache, simplicity and a nice sense of essentiality.

If the key is therefore comedy, lightness, this allows us to better fix the question dealt with and the absurdity of which it is emblem: while mankind and its civilization risk collapse, too many continue to behave as if nothing had happened. , to continue the usual life made up of continuous waste and the search for a superfluous that seems essential. A sort of removal of danger, of (self) anesthesia. Until the urgency breaks. Violent and inescapable. Like Covid.

Kind of continuation of The faithful man (The faithful man, of 2018), Garrel’s previous feature film longer without exaggeration and far more introspective, this time the family point of view slips from the parents, Abel (Louis Garrel) and Marianne (Laetitia Casta), to their son Joseph (Joseph Engel). They are the same interpreters of The faithful man, which we find to interpret the same family, which in large part is a real family even in reality. Garrel has in fact been married since 2017 to Casta, with whom he had a son, Azel, last spring. Without forgetting Oumy, the Senegalese girl he adopted together with his previous partner (actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), for whom years ago he confessed to feeling a continuous anxiety, the fear that at any moment he could get hurt or otherwise. The crusade it therefore appears to be a “child” of the fear of not knowing how to adequately protect one’s children. And in fact, the starting point is this: how much of unstoppable consumer parents think about the basic issues related to the future of their children in this historical moment of “greatest danger for humanity”, as Kennedy said, referring however to the threat of a nuclear war?

This is the question that Joseph poses to his parents: without asking it explicitly, but putting them in front of real facts and their actions as children fully aware of reality. In fact, Joseph and many other kids from all over the world, including Africa, have begun to sell, and sell off, all those familiar objects that they consider useless, to finance a vast financing project to save Africa and, by extension, the entire planet. . To the angry protests of his parents, he always replies calmly, often seraphic: “If they were such essential objects, why do you notice them four months later?”.

Eventually the parents give up, so much so that the mother even becomes an accomplice of the child’s generation, extremely interconnected and absolutely equal in terms of gender, sex, race or other. The so-called millennial generation really seems to never have to end. Not that – unlike all the others – it is perfect, as some scenes of the film reveal. It’s just that it doesn’t pretend to be. The crusade they carry out, the names of the boys themselves, are a great biblical undertaking; however the irony with which the director tells it always refers to the concrete, more prosaic world. Although the tension of the boys towards something high is always authentic, and their determination is concrete.

The ability to naturally isolate brief representative moments of the various contexts told, contexts that we can reconnect to the rest of society, can be found from beginning to end also in portraying the behaviors and speeches of adults. Not elderly adults, not low-class adults, attention, but well-off young people in their thirties or forties, expression of a shapeless and indefinite social bubble, theoretically progressive and open-minded but perhaps, in the end, much more vacant. In France they are called sores, acronym for bohemian-bourgeois.

Who once had a free and nonconformist culture and lifestyle today is a bourgeois devoid of inhibitions in defending their interests, their status quo. Even denying the evidence of the facts, even resorting to more or less underground methods, depending on the case. In short, these are people who are often soft and lacking in high internal demands. And it is this slightly immoral couch potato softness – but at the same time perhaps not even aware of how his way of being is in reality devoid of morality – that the film represents well precisely because it does not give the impression of doing so, precisely because it does not he takes too seriously even though he takes very seriously the anguish and moral question posed by young people, indeed by the very young. Kids seem like they want to shock their parents to make real awareness grow in them. “But what future will ever await me, how can I be a father (or a mother) and give happiness to my children? Do you really think about this essential point? ”. This seems to be the question they ask.

With reversed roles
The roles of parents and children are therefore reversed. And the teaching comes from below. The authority that in the face of the Apocalypse – with a capital A – seems to want to ignore everything, even to the grotesque, loses all authority. Thus, before the actual apocalypse, an apocalypse of thought and ideal seems to be already underway, which has generated a sort of blob of the mediocrity that devours everything and takes away any real meaning from things.

Adults already seem old in terms of internal tension. Just look at his parents’ friends rather than the protagonist’s family. Who deliver apparently non-reactionary speeches, but which with their evident emptiness end up being so. The writing, in a few strokes, outlines a generation that has studied and seems to know nothing even before aspiring to nothing, risking to bring the entire human race into nothingness. Their denial speeches with which they discredit the information that the scientific community leaks – with great difficulty, among other things, due to the influence of the energy lobbies – befits Trump followers and the like. They do not distinguish scientific evidence from media alarmism, so much so that stupidity and bad faith seem the same thing. And this is precisely what the film photographs, light but relentless: the disconnect with reality not among the lower classes, but in the middle-upper classes and with progressive and left-wing cultural origins.

“You have stolen my money and my childhood with your empty words. Yet I am one of the lucky ones. Some people are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? “. The words of Greta Thunberg we hear in the film resonate here as one of the most powerful j’accuse to the adult world, as perhaps no intellectual has been able to pronounce in recent years.

E The crusade he expresses them by making his own, even in the filmic form, the playful, joyful child-game. What remains, despite everything. The work has the soul of a child, in the best sense. The criticisms leveled at her often do not understand this. Brevity, here, allows for density. The merit, not small, is also of the co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, writer, great screenwriter of films for the greatest internationally and already co-author of The faithful man, who passed away in early February last year and to whom the film is dedicated. Carrière had written the idea for the film shortly before Greta Thunberg was heard of. A cultured adult who had already understood.