cinefranco

Les fourmis rouges (Red Ants) (Director: Stéphan Carpiaux): You only need to look at the film’s poster to determine the appeal of Stéphan Carpiaux’s debut fea­ture. The stun­ningly beau­tiful Déborah François plays 16-year-old Alex, who lives alone with her father and helps him run his garage in the Belgian coun­tryside. Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t really any­thing spe­cial, and if it weren’t for the mag­netism of young Ms. François, I prob­ably wouldn’t have watched this until the pre­dict­ably upbeat ending.

Alex and her father Franck are still grieving the loss of her mother and his wife in an auto acci­dent sev­eral years before. As Alex grows into woman­hood, she begins to resemble her mother more and more, even as she attempts to replace her in Franck’s life. This leads to some awk­ward longing glances between the two, though neither seem artic­u­late enough to deal with this taboo dir­ectly. Her father’s debts are piling up as he neg­lects his busi­ness, and he’s rebuffing the efforts of Anne, a book­keeper who wants to help but who com­plic­ated things years before when she expressed her romantic interest in Franck too soon after his wife’s death. Alex is also a loner, and des­pite her looks, only seems to be bait for teasing from the boys at school.

In order to help with the mounting bills, she takes a job looking after Irène, an older English woman who lives with her adopted “nephew” Hector, who is a musical genius but also an oddball with no friends. Predictably, the rela­tion­ship with Irène starts out rocky, thaws a bit, and then chills again. The woman is wholly dependent upon Hector and refuses to let him pursue his musical edu­ca­tion. There is an entirely pre­dict­able sub­plot about her trying to pre­vent him from attending the Conservatory and another uncon­vin­cingly linking Alex and Hector romantically.

It was frus­trating to watch these inar­tic­u­late char­ac­ters struggle to try to deal with their pent-up emo­tions. As well, there were so many clichés in the storytelling that it became dis­tracting. Of course, Alex runs away from home wearing a clingy dress, and then is caught in a down­pour. Combining the use of pathetic fal­lacy (because she is sad, it rains) with the chance to show her soaking wet in a clingy dress might have seemed eco­nom­ical to the dir­ector, but it made me cringe.

To make mat­ters even more con­fusing, there is a repeated story about the pro­gres­sion of a line of red ants that made no sense to me, unless it had some­thing to do with the recur­ring images of wind­mills. I don’t think I’m that deaf to meta­phor; I just couldn’t put it together.

Les fourmis rouges is not exactly a ter­rible film. It’s just not as ser­ious as it thinks it is, nor as fresh. The excep­tion, of course, is Déborah François, whom I think I could watch in any­thing from now on.

(6/10)

Tagged as: belgium, cinefranco, coming-of-age

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