Too ambiguous for its own good
There is alarming evidence that important tipping points, leading to irreversible changes in major ecosystems and the planetary climate system, may already have been reached or passed. Ecosystems as diverse as the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic tundra, may be approaching thresholds of dramatic change through warming and drying. Mountain glaciers are in alarming retreat and the downstream effects of reduced water supply in the driest months will have repercussions that transcend generations.
"Climate Change"; United Nations
Based on Christophe Dufossé's 2002 novel, L'Heure de la sortie [lit. trans. The Time to Exit ] had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival where it screened in the new "Sconfini" section, a non-competition category for difficult-to-classify films. Which should tell you a great deal. If you can imagine the ecological themes of films such as Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011) or Paul Schrader's First Reformed (2017), filtered through the milieu of Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), but with the tonal qualities of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960) or Fritz Kiersch's Children of the Corn (1984), then you'd be some way towards nailing director and co-writer Sébastien Marnier's second feature. Is it a satire about liberal Generation Z snowflakes overdramatically reading apocalyptic omens into trivial matters? Is it an allegory about how difficult it can be for gifted children to fit into so-called normal society? Is it a metaphor for the generation gap, and how today's children can often be alienated from even relatively young adults? Is it about desensitisation amongst a generation who have never known life without the internet or a world without post-9/11 paranoia? Is it a desperate call-to-arms, a plea on behalf of tomorrow's adults that humanity is rapidly reaching the point-of-no-return in terms of the damage we are doing to the Earth? Is it a horror movie about creepy kids doing creepy things? Is it all of these?
The film opens in the prestigious St. Joseph's in France, a private middle school with an excellent reputation. On an unusually warm day, as a class of troisième students (children aged 13-14) are quietly sitting a test, their teacher, Professor Eric Capadis (Cyrille Hertel), casually walks to the window, opens it, and throws himself to his death. Most of the students are shocked, but six remain relatively unfazed. Several days later, Pierre Hoffman (Laurent Lafitte) arrives at St. Joseph's as a temporary substitute for Capadis. Still writing his own PhD thesis, Pierre believes the job will be straightforward, even though the class is for intellectually advanced students. Almost immediately, however, he learns they are far ahead of where he thought they would be. Seeing how deeply unpopular a central clique of six especially gifted students (the same six who weren't especially bothered by Capadis's death) are amongst the school's other pupils (and many of the teachers), Pierre tries to ingratiate himself with them, but gets nowhere. Meanwhile, he begins to notice odd behaviour, such as when one of the students arrives for school with facial injuries, but no-one seems to care. With his curiosity getting the better of him, he starts following them, learning that they head to an abandoned quarry every day after school, where they have hidden a collection of DVDs. Upon viewing the discs, Pierre finds they contain endless hours of footage of industrial animal slaughter and food processing intercut with images of nuclear conflagrations, flashes of apocalyptic biblical imagery, and dire warnings about the unsustainable future of humanity. Unnerved by his find, he soon comes to believe the clique are watching him. Are they responsible for the mysterious late-night phone calls he has been getting? Do they have anything to do with his tap water turning brown? Or his electricity turning on and off? Or his missing laptop? What about the cockroaches that invade his apartment? Could the clique even have been involved with Capadis's suicide? But to what end? What are they planning, and why?
I ended both of the above paragraphs with a series of questions for a reason. Namely, to emphasise that if you're looking for definitive answers here, you won't get them. Virtually none of the mysteries the film throws up, of which there are a hell of a lot, are conclusively resolved. The film is happy for you to peer inside, but Marnier steadfastly refuses to give you much info to contextualise what you're looking at. Speaking to Cineuropa, Marnier explains that the film begins as if to present
the opacity of adolescence through the eyes of a 40-year-old man [...] I was interested in placing viewers inside Pierre's head and body, as if to hypnotise, contaminate and poison them.
However, as Pierre gets more and more unnerved by the clique, the film slowly changes course; according to Marnier, this is
the point at which the classic confrontation forks off towards a point of rupture.
The nature of this rupture, however, is never really clarified, as Marnier is far more interested in asking questions than answering them. There are certainly clues about what it all means, and the audience is pushed in certain directions from time to time, but even the final scene, although it does suggest some answers, also raises more questions.
In theory, I don't have a problem with this kind of narrative. Films built around ambiguity, where certain details are withheld, and everything is left up to subjective interpretation, can work extremely well (after all, one of my all time favourite films is Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life ). However, the mysteries of L'Heure de la sortie are very different to those found in Malick, or, say, David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001), Inland Empire (2006), or Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Whilst Lynch's films tend to function as sensory puzzles, where the audience must bend their interpretation around what is on screen, with every little aural and visual detail meaning something (and often more than one thing) in relation to the whole, L'Heure de la sortie is more of an intellectual conundrum, asking question after question without time to pause, and then stepping back and asking, finally, "so what do you think I was trying to say there ?"
Speaking of one possible interpretation of the film, (namely, the ecological one – that this generation is gifting to the next a planet we have largely destroyed, something about which we're not overly bothered), Marnier states,
we are aware but we're not fighting anymore – not just because we feel let down by politicians. I think the world has become so scary that we take refuge in our little lives, trying to make them as pleasant as possible.
The clique act as if they have no hope for the future, and that they firmly believe the world left for them (their "era " as they call it) will throw up problems the likes of which humanity will be unable to overcome. Of this meaning, Marnier explains,
the film states that we are still waiting for the disaster to happen so that "living together" and collective awareness can take shape again. But we need to work together before it's too late.
The clique don't share this optimism, believing too much damage has already been done. In fact, they believe that optimism itself is part of the problem; as one points out, "it's too late, there's no future. You don't want to face the truth ."
As this might suggest, the film tackles political and social themes infinitely more weighty than those typically found in Lynch (who tends to focus on psychological issues), but as an artistic statement, I found it lacking. And whereas the absence of any obvious directorial or authorial "statement" in Lynch's work is actually part of what makes it so successful, here, due to the various political themes raised, the question of "what is the director trying to say " remains front-and-centre the entire time. I rarely ask myself that question when watching a Lynch film, or a Malick film, or a Guy Maddin film; I might ask it afterwards, but during the experiential moment, the artistry becomes its own referent. During L'Heure de la sortie , I was constantly wondering to myself, "what does Marnier mean by that ?", something I don't even do when viewing the work of a politically allegorical filmmaker such as Peter Greenaway. The narrative jumps from unanswered question to half-answered question to unexplained scene to unclear theme back to unanswered question, throwing so much gasoline on the fire that it burns itself out. By roughly the half-way point, I had stopped caring why Capadis had killed himself, because there were about fifteen other unanswered questions rattling about. And it's a case of ever diminishing returns – the more mysteries that go unaddressed, the less important each of them feels.
But it's not just that there are too many mysteries. Again, this can work well in the right hands. Rather, it's that few of them ever connect to the others. Take, for example, the hobo scene in Mulholland Dr. For much of the runtime, it seems completely divorced from everything else in the film. But we do eventually learn how it relates to the main plot, even if it remains ambiguous. L'Heure de la sortie is full of what feels like completely disconnected mysteries. There's also little to reward the patient or observant viewer. Contrast it with films such as Lost Highway , when we recognise the police sirens at the end are the same ones that Fred (Bill Pullman) heard in the opening scene, or Mulholland Dr. , when the Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) explains to Adam (Justin Theroux) what it will mean if he sees him "two more times ", and right at the end, we see him for the second time. There's nothing like that in L'Heure de la sortie , with so much feeling like it exists in isolation from everything else.
Which is not to say there is nothing to like about the film. The 1980s-style retro score, by John Carpenter aficionados Zombie Zombie, is excellent, and Romain Carcanade's cinematography is superb, using anamorphic lenses to distort interiors in tandem with Pierre's crumpling mental state, and really hammering home how monumentally hot it's supposed to be, using a recurring visual motif of beads of sweat. Additionally, there are some wonderful touches in the screenplay, co-written by Marnier and Elise Griffon. For example, Pierre is writing a thesis on Franz Kafka and his apartment is invaded by cockroaches.
There are also individual scenes of great brilliance. For all its unsettling weirdness and creepy kids, for me, the most disturbing scene was one based entirely in reality. When an alarm sounds in the school, Pierre asks if it's a fire drill, and the class all but laugh at the question. Of course it isn't a fire drill – it's an active shooter drill. The students calmly gather their things and move to the wall, sitting under the windows looking into the corridor. However, when Pierre joins them, they chastise him, not once, but twice – firstly, for leaving his own things on his desk, meaning if a shooter walks by, they will look in and know someone is in there, and secondly, he forgets to turn his phone onto airplane mode. The scene is chillingly effective in it profound mundanity, not only showing us their accustomed and dispassionate response, but in hammering home the very different lives that people of Pierre's age led when they were in school. Obviously, this speaks to the generation divide, but it also speaks to issues of desensitisation; the state of the world has sufficiently traumatised these children to the point where something like this is routine; the possibility that a shooter might wander into a school and start killing people is not something any child (in any country) should live with. In fact, if you read the scene allegorically, it actually suggests that not only did older generations grow up in a different environment, should the worst happen, they are relatively powerless to protect the next generation, and may even end up getting them killed. That's essentially the polar opposite of what an adult is supposed to bring to a young person's life.
All in all though, despite these elements, the film left me disappointed. It builds up very nicely in the early stages, but about mid-way through the second act, it flounders, as you start to realise it's not actually building to anything specific. Even the dénouement is insipid (although the short coda that ends the film is excellent; evocative and properly creepy). The characterisation is also poor, with only Pierre given any kind of arc, whilst the children themselves remain empty avatars, devoid of psychological verisimilitude. I'm also not entirely convinced that if you want to prod people into action vis-à-vis climate change, the best way to go about it is by presenting a mystery-thriller that has no intentions of explaining what is going on – the vehicle just doesn't correlate with the message. It's worth a look, but given the scope of the themes and the nature of the central message, you would hope for a lot more.
