Coming-of-age stories are ten-a-penny for independent cinema, and the genre has produced enough sensitive teenagers staring out of car windows to last several lifetimes. So it’s a small triumph that director Katharina Rivilis manages to find genuinely new ground with I’ll Be Gone in June, a surprising little Wim Wenders-produced gem premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
The film follows Franny (Naomi Cosma), a German exchange student who arrives in New Mexico in August 2001 for a year abroad. The title tells us from the start that this experience is finite, and that particular quality of temporary belonging is present in every scene. In making Franny a foreigner in the US at an especially complex time, the film manages to offer us a new dynamic that you won’t see in your average Bildungsroman. Lady Bird was set in the same era, but this is a very different spin.
Initially, the plot moves quite glacially as Franny’s new world is established. Her host family are a welcoming, if slightly offbeat, mix of oddballs – 14-year-old Dani apparently channelling Sissy Spacek in 3 Women – and her schoolmates, including another German exchange student, are steadily reeled through. The action really gets going, though, when 9/11 rears its head. Franny watches footage of the attack with her host family on a hazy TV screen, and although 9/11 doesn’t redirect the story, it casts a permanent shadow across it, as the real event did.
Rivilis manages to articulate with brilliant accuracy what life was like for teenagers at this time better than any film I’ve seen. For those of us who lived through it, 9/11 was seismic, but also a decidedly odd backdrop to your adolescence: a point when you’re discovering yourself and trying to figure out what place you’ll take in the world, when that world has changed profoundly overnight, and the adults around you are cluelessly trying to make sense of it too. Many of the subsequent scenes feel starkly familiar: the endless panic as the US and the world dealt with something it didn’t have a blueprint for, the classroom discussions and debates about whether the actions being taken were correct, how it coloured everything around it in 2001-2, every conversation traipsing back towards it somehow.
Franny’s position as an immigrant in a country that’s suddenly mistrustful of foreigners gives the film its sharpest edge: forgetting her passport at an internal border check, her host family scolding her for speaking German at home instead of English, or getting called a Nazi by another student who considers it a jokey nickname instead of a vicious slur. There’s a powerful scene where Franny’s new love interest takes her to the site where the first A-bomb dropped, and there’s a parallel with 9/11 here too: wondering how it’s possible to come of age at all when the concept of the world’s darkest evils is ever-present around you.
The romantic subplot is the film’s weakest element, as Franny falls for a brooding, long-haired musician. This is the one part that felt like every other coming-of-age story, literally a revamped version of the type of boy teenage girls in movies have been chasing after for decades. Maybe there’s some truth in that, and we all have a point where we mistake melancholy for depth. Greta Gerwig’s aforementioned dramedy covered this ground too with Timothee Chalamet’s character, and it’s familiar enough to feel slightly dutiful, though it serves its narrative purpose.
New Mexico, as a location, is beautifully rendered by cinematographer Giulia Schelhas. It’s always made to look slightly surreal; the roaming desert hills always feel a touch disorienting. It feels intentional to make this landscape feel like a dreamworld to reflect Franny’s own disorientation as a foreigner there. One character mentions never having seen the ocean, which European audiences may find unusual, but Rivilis is alert to the symmetry: Franny has probably never seen a desert. The cinematography is the film’s quiet visual triumph, its blues and reds recalling the work of Éric Rohmer at his most sun-drenched, and the final shot is genuinely stunning and distinctly memorable.
While not every element is original, I’ll Be Gone in June does what the best films in this genre manage: it captures a very specific time and place, both in a person’s life and in the world. In Franny, Rivilis has found a protagonist ideally positioned to observe a country in crisis. A coming-of-age tale with a difference.
★★★★
In cinemas soon / Naomi Cosma, David Flores, Bianca Dumais, Elijah De Billie / Dir: Katharina Rivilis / Road Movies, Filmproduktion /
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