‘La Gradiva’ Review: Marine Atlan’s Coming of Age Story Debut Erupts with Keen Observation [A]
Coming-of-age films often rely on a familiar promise: place a group of teenagers together, let their personalities collide, and watch adulthood slowly emerge from the friction. It is a formula that has generated countless memorable films, but also countless forgettable ones. What makes Marine Atlan’s debut feature La Gradiva so remarkable is not that it reinvents the genre, but that it approaches it with an uncommon degree of patience, honesty, and trust.
The film begins on a train headed to Italy as a group of high school students embarks on a school trip to Pompeii, bringing with them all the anxieties, desires, insecurities, and contradictions one would expect from teenagers standing at the threshold of adulthood. At first, they appear familiar enough. We recognize the types. We think we know where the film is headed. Then, almost imperceptibly, something shifts. The categories dissolve. These students stop feeling like characters and start feeling like people.
What defines La Gradiva is not transformation, but observation. Atlan captures young people with a degree of honesty that feels increasingly rare on screen, not because she idealizes them, but because she allows them the freedom to be inconsistent, awkward, impulsive, generous, cruel, thoughtful, and ridiculous, sometimes within the same scene. Few recent films about Gen Z feel this attentive in the way they scan behavior. In that sense, La Gradiva extends its own logic of observation: the same attention that shapes the way the students look at art, at each other, and at the world is turned back onto them. Adolescence here is not dramatized through conflict so much as revealed through perception, through the small hesitations, misreadings, and adjustments that accumulate into something quietly absorbing.
One of the film’s most beautiful ideas lies in the way it uses art itself. As the students move through museums, archaeological sites, and historical landmarks, their reactions become a form of self-portraiture. They encounter paintings, sculptures, and ruins, but what emerges from these encounters is not an art lesson. It is character. Their observations are funny, blunt, occasionally misguided, and often deeply revealing. What they notice, what they misunderstand, and what fascinates them tells us more about who they are than any confessional scene ever could.
There is also an unexpected suspense running through La Gradiva. Not the suspense of plot twists or revelations, but the suspense of discovery. We constantly feel that there is more to these students than what they initially reveal. Every conversation, every silence, every glance feels capable of exposing something essential. Atlan never forces these moments. She waits for them. More impressively, she trusts us to notice them.
That confidence is visible in every frame. Atlan is hardly a newcomer to cinema, having established herself as a cinematographer on notable debut works by Iris Kaltenbäck, Louise Hémon, and Alexis Langlois. Shooting La Gradiva herself, she demonstrates a remarkable command of space and movement. The film is filled with large ensemble scenes, overlapping conversations, and shifting group dynamics, yet it never loses its visual clarity. Even at nearly two and a half hours, it maintains the effortless rhythm of a summer memory unfolding in real time.
The film finds an emotional anchor in Toni, a teenager carrying burdens that seem heavier than those of his classmates. His difficult home life, marked by his mother’s mental struggles, has left visible traces on his behavior. Yet it is his relationship with James that gives the film some of its most moving moments. Their connection is rendered with extraordinary delicacy. A look held a second too long. A gesture that means more than words. A concern disguised as friendship. Atlan captures adolescence as something often lived internally, and she approaches these emotions with remarkable patience.
James, meanwhile, is one of the film’s most fascinating creations. Effortlessly charismatic, he moves through the group with a confidence that naturally draws others toward him. Friends seek his approval, conversations seem to orbit around him, and he appears instinctively aware of the effect he has on those around him. There is something quietly manipulative in the way he navigates relationships, not necessarily out of malice but because charm itself can become a form of power. Yet the character is never reduced to that function. He remains frustrating, desirable, selfish, generous, and vulnerable all at once. Atlan resists turning him into a type. Instead, James remains unstable, shifting, recognizably human as he leaves emotional turbulence behind while continuing to attract those who know better.
Equally remarkable is the place she gives the teachers. Films rarely know what to do with educators. They are often reduced to comic figures, authority figures, or narrative obstacles. In La Gradiva, they are treated with uncommon respect. Through Madame Mercier, beautifully portrayed by Antonia Buresi, Atlan acknowledges the emotional labor of teaching without turning the character into a symbol or a subplot. She remains fully integrated into the life of the group, an adult presence who understands that guidance sometimes means knowing when not to intervene.
For all its gentleness, La Gradiva is also deeply political. Questions of class, privilege, and opportunity quietly shape nearly every interaction. The students do not occupy the same world, even when they share the same classroom. Some possess a safety net invisible to others. Some can afford mistakes. Others cannot. The film never turns these realities into speeches, yet they remain present in every relationship and every conflict. As the trip progresses, Atlan reveals how profoundly social structures shape the futures available to each of these young people.
The result is a film that contains nearly everything adolescence can hold: desire, embarrassment, friendship, cruelty, harassment, loneliness, tenderness, and fleeting moments of connection. Yet what lingers is neither nostalgia nor melancholy. It is the feeling of having spent time with people rather than characters. By the end of La Gradiva, Atlan has achieved something deceptively difficult. She has made observation feel like drama.
Grade: A
This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where La Gradiva had its world premiere in the Critics Week section and won the Grand Prize. 1-2 Special will release the film theatrically in the U.S.
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