Khédidja earns her living as a nanny for a white, wealthy Parisian family. When the latter goes to Corsica for the summer holidays, Khédidja joins the trip, consumed by apprehension. This is because, fifteen years earlier, she left the island in a hurry with her two daughters, Jessica and Farah, after the accidental death of their father.
While Khédidja struggles with her memories, the two kids, now teenagers, let themselves be carried away by summer temptations. While Jessica, promised a bright future, experiences her first romantic feelings with the daughter of her mother’s boss, the ebullient Farah will go to great lengths to break the feet of a racist and flirtatious young beach lifeguard.
However, tension rises when the girls, following in the footsteps of their family memory, discover the truth about their father’s death.
In the running for the Palme d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival – its selection had also sowed controversy -, The return is a carnal, generous and sunny film which takes a lucid and sensitive look at society, and at what it means to grow up there when you are not one of the privileged ones.
Thus, the scenario by Catherine Corsini and Naïla Guiguet deploys, through a classic but credible initiatory story – that of the summer when everything changed – the panoply of microviolence and social and family frictions that exile and its heritage, class and cultural divides, homosexuality, racism and parental expectations.
Far from being didactic, the feature film is first and foremost a great love story which, although conventional, touches on the universal. It is also impossible not to fall for the characters of Jessica and Farah, two multidimensional teenagers completely opposite to each other, in whom each pair of sisters will recognize themselves. The young actress Esther Gohourou, who plays the second, bursts onto the screen as she is given lines that are as scathing as they are touching, which highlight all the contradictions of the adults around her.
Camera on the shoulder, the filmmaker stands as close as possible to her heroines, capturing emotions like the rays of the sun on the skin, the proximity of bodies and the first sighs, recalling, as Luca Guadagnino did in Call Me By Your Name (2017), that first loves reveal us first and foremost to ourselves.
In the background, the heavenly and rocky landscapes of Corsica reflect all the contrasts of the film, from languor to romance, including tensions, secrets, disappointments and pitfalls, and embrace the emotional roller coaster specific to the film. ‘adolescence.
Exactly, The return has no great ambitions, except to remember this decisive summer during which we take flight to begin the second stage of our life. Catherine Corsini does not hesitate to borrow from the classics of the genre, following a dramatic line which is reminiscent of certain series for teenagers which can be found on one or other of the streaming platforms. We roll our eyes or jump headlong into this satisfying nostalgia.