Jeunesse

Julien Samani garnered attention with his first feature film, LA PEAU TROUÉE, which received the 2005 Jean Vigo Award, an abrupt and powerful documentary filmed on a fishing boat that pursues sharks. In JEUNESSE, adapted from the eponymous novel by Joseph Conrad, he once again sets out to the sea, which is, this time around, a sea of minimum fiction and the initiation rite of a young boy, Zico, who knows nothing but his exalted dreams and who learns step by step, on a worn-out trawler, to become who he will be. His mentor, who also happens to be an old and exhausted captain who has lost the passion that drives the boy, is magnificently played by Jean-François Stévenin, with thinning, white and unruly hair atop a body in an advanced state of decay. There’s no need to wait for the credits and the announcement that the narrator’s off voice, the young Zico, now a captain and old himself, belongs to the famous film director Patrick Grandperret, to understand that this high-sea fable definitely points to other equally violent backwashes, namely, those of cinema itself. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)