★★★★
There’s an instability of form that adds a fascinating dimension to André Téchiné’s most recent film.
Being 17 sometimes runs realistic, but then it turns lyric. The tone is sometimes dramatic, but then it shifts unexpectedly to the melodramatic. The mashup of these tones reminds us throughout that we’re watching a fiction, but Téchiné’s master stroke is that a touching story emerges anyway. We’d expect the formal inconsistency of
Being 17 to take away from the film’s impact, but the story and Téchiné’s strong visual storytelling leave us moved at the end of the film.
The formal swings here almost disengage us. Very realistic scenes, like those inside Damien’s middle class house and school, are juxtaposed with poetic imagery of the soaring, mountainous countryside of Hautes-Pyrénées and Tomas stripping off his clothes to skinny dip in a frigid mountain pool. And like these visuals, the actions of the characters range in tone. There are dramatic moments that seem like something from a realistic film. Tomas and Damien get into a fight on the basketball court like we’d expect to see in any high school movie. But in a flash, we’re watching a scene of Damien and his mother in tears during the drawn-out military funeral of Nathan. It’s impossible to see
Being 17 and maintain the pretense that it’s a realistic film. Téchiné foregrounds the cinematic throughout with his whiplash shifts of tone and genre.
There is also a looseness that highlights the cinematic art. The ending jerks from one unlikely cliché to the next to the extent that we lose causality in the last few moments of the film. And Téchiné inserts on-the-nose exposition at more than one point. You need to trust more, Marianne tells her son Damien as though telling us the moral center of her son's character arc. I was scared, Tomas says, to explain to us his violence toward Damien. On the level of imagery, Tomas is a wild nature boy, but Téchiné develops this identification only to leave it hanging without a payoff. And even the scene where Tomas can finally feel a part of his adoptive family is borrowed from sentimental literature when Tomas holds the new baby. It’s as though
Being 17 tries to take us out of film by its many self-referential gestures.
Téchiné’s achievement here, though, is that despite the formal self-reflection,
Being 17 is still a deeply touching film with a living human heart. Both Damien and Tomas are 17 year olds, and both are coming to terms with being gay and experiencing their first loves. Part of the transcending power of their story comes from a script that distills the drama in the boy’s situation into a few essential coming-of-age moments. When Damien has Tomas drive him to a tryst he’s set up online, for example, the sequence releases a range of emotions among the characters – vulnerability, fear, anger, disappointment and jealousy – that communicate through the film’s formal expression. Another strength of the script is its reliance on visuals and movement as opposed to dialog. Téchiné and Céline Sciamma tell this story in close-ups and gestures rather than words, which strengthens the impact of what’s happening. The actors, too, bring home the story's importance with their dedication to their characters. Whether in a romantic or realistic mode, they maintain their characters appropriately through the tonal shifts. And these shifts themselves even help us focus on the story since their frequent swings lead us to distill the truth tying these various forms together.
Being 17 is a genuine cinematic achievement with both formal brio and a touching emotional core. It’s altogether appropriate that the soundtrack for this film of two French kids in the Hautes-Pyrénées includes a West African song by a musician singing in Dyula and playing an acoustic guitar so it sounds like a kora. Form doesn’t matter when we can feel hearts connected.
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