A shared memory of the past

A film about slipping fantasies, Robin Campillo’s semi-autobiographical Red Island begins with a daydream of a world of miniature buildings and doll-faced men confronting a masked girl. The girl quickly turns out to be a visualization of Fantômette, the heroine of the popular Georges Chaulet book series that bears her name, and a particular obsession of Campillo’s 10-year-old double Thomas (Charlie Vauselle).

The film is set largely on a military base in Madagascar, from 1970 to 1972. It is a decade after the island nation’s independence from France, but various links to the former colonial power remain, with French soldiers staying at their bases and working alongside the local troops. Perhaps inevitably, the strangely paradoxical Red Island is at the same time listless and urgent, relaxed, but with a clear view of how quickly everything will end for the central characters.

Not that Thomas, who looks out from the army box into which he often retreats, sees the impending loss of his home. He is far too fixated on the adults around him, especially his father Robert (Quim Gutierrez), who is an airman, and his loving mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), as well as on the budding friendship with classmates and fellow students Fantomette Beloved Suzanne (Cathy Pham).

Until the day before the withdrawal of the French troops Red Island focuses mostly on everyday matters, including Thomas’s craving for attention from his family and his curiosity about the world of wayward soldiers and prized possessions around him. But despite all this, Campillo and Gilles Marchand’s script feels diffuse. Its general fixation on youthful nostalgia comes across as an unproductively incomplete viewpoint given the massive questions it raises about identity and France’s place in a place it has repressed for over 60 years.

The narrative eventually leads to what can be seen as the film’s ultimate move: Red Island is told from the perspective of the white family members until the final 15 minutes, when Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), an officer’s girlfriend, converses in Malagasy with a local soldier before leaving the base and attending a celebration for the release of imprisoned protesters. This ending leaves the film on an optimistic note for a people asserting their independence, but in a way that shies away from engaging with the ambiguous nature of the central family’s final interactions: hints of an impending divorce upon their return to France give way to an extended genderbending sequence in which Thomas sneaks around at night in a Fantômette costume.

If Red Island is ultimately too divided in its interests to function fully as a grand statement about French troops in Madagascar or as an accurate portrait of childhood in a foreign place, but it is not without its own allusion. The trade in BPM (beats per minute)Campillo plays with the surreality of certain moments by composing the film in scope format for the Academy format: the motif of the skydivers in a jagged line over the hills of Madagascar, a slow-motion scene of the family’s efforts to shoo hornets out of their bathroom, and all the amusingly exaggerated fantômette sequences.

The most impressive scene is one in which military families and locals alike watch a 16mm copy of Abel Gance’s Napoleon on the beach, projected onto a sheet against the waves. As Napoleon battles a storm while Robespierre’s radicals seize control of the National Assembly, it functions as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, this time ending before our eyes.