The high school student is the 14e movie the Christophe Honore (Love songs (2007), Well love (2011) et To please, to love and to run fast (2018) Louis-Delluc prize…). The opportunity for the director to recall his attachment to Lyon and to the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in particular.
“I have a special history with Lyon. I staged an opera there (Pelléas and MélissandeEd), one piece, The Sky of Nantes, and I work with Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes-Cinéma. I loved filming in Chambéry, and particularly in this village whose name immediately struck me, La Chambre. I am not one of those directors who come to ask Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinema, who shoot in Lyon, and make people believe that the film is taking place in Paris”, loose Christophe Honoré, with irony.
Grégory Faes, Auvergne Rhône Alpes Cinema: “The encounter remains the soul of cinema”
The High School Student in the vein of the film A nos amours
autobiographical film, The high school student takes place, in a way, in the intimate chronology of the author, after the moving play The Sky of Nantes (Lyon, Célestins, 2021) which stops before the car accident of the author’s father. “I had set myself the target of expressing emotions linked to a particular period of my adolescence, when my father disappeared. It is a film that I have often postponed but here, I do not know why, I felt armed enough to try to project myself back into this story…”
Like Annie Ernaux who says: “What I haven’t written, it’s as if I haven’t lived it”, Christophe Honoré is of this vein.
“I always need to experience things twice, once in real life and once in the cinema.”
There is in The high school studentsomethingTo our Loves40 years later, where Christophe Honoré would be Maurice Pialat (including physical resemblance) and Paul Kircher would be Sandrine Bonnaire (Suzanne).
Towards an interpretation prize for Paul Kircher?
Probably one of Honoré’s best films, The high school studentshows the vivid and sensitive portrait of a 20-year-old boy from the 2020s in France, in his upset family life, his beginner homosexual love life, his doubts. “My life has become a wild beast, I can no longer approach it without it biting me…” The whole thing with a handheld camera, close to the faces and bodies, in particular of Lucas (Paul Kircher), with small touches, strangely both modest and raw.
Paul Kircher, son of actors Jérôme Kircher andIrene Jacob (also president of the Lumière Institute), won the interpretation prize at the San Sebastian festival in Spain. If he could follow in the footsteps of Sandrine Bonnaire with a César for male hope in 2023, we would not be disappointed!
Note the presence of Juliette Binoche, impeccable mother of Lucas, and Vincent Lacoste, rather funny and caricatured as a visual artist, brother of Lucas.
Adolescence as a thriller
The film follows an implacable logic until the viewer feels in two hours a bit like in a thriller, one wonders how the filmmaker will get us out of all this, and how the youngster will get out of it in step. It’s kind of the definition of adolescence: make or break…
Le Lycéen, theatrical release on November 30.