Lucas is 17 when suddenly his adolescence is shattered. With the help of his brother, who has moved to Paris, and his mother, with whom he now lives alone, he will have to struggle to learn to hope and love again.
Paul Kircher won the prize for best actor at the Cinemania French-language film festival, held in Montreal. The French press is also very interested these days in this young unknown as Christophe Honoré (love songs, Room 212) chose from at least 300 applicants. There is no reason to be surprised. In The high school studentthe actor is a true revelation, offering a kind of performance that is reminiscent of that of Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name. “I don’t know if the cinema will be up to what it can offer in the cinema”, declared the filmmaker. It places us.
Like so many of his colleagues – is this the effect of the pandemic? –, Christophe Honoré turned to his own memories of adolescence to write his most personal film. Better: he even assigned himself the role, brief, but oh so significant, of the father, to whom Lucas, the protagonist, is very close. The accidental death of the father (the filmmaker lost his at the age of 15) has of course a very strong impact on the family dynamics – Juliette Binoche interprets the mother of Lucas and Vincent Lacoste, his older brother –, but still more in the life of this young homosexual building himself up.
At the invitation of Quentin, his brother who lives in Paris, Lucas is invited to spend a week in the City of Light, just to get out of mourning and experience life in an urban environment. The young man will thus take advantage of the opportunity to enter adulthood in his own way, not without danger.
With great delicacy, but also in a more frontal way, Christophe Honoré echoes the torments of late adolescence, in all its aspects. The high school student is a film that is both fragile and violent, one of the most accurate about this particular period of life, marked in this case by great inner confusion.
Indoors
Drama
The high school student
Christophe Honore
With Paul Kircher, Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lacoste
2:02 a.m.