Reel Life: Cannes Kaleidoscope-Singing away the blues

It is peak of summer for me at the National Capital Region, complete with the voltage fluctuations, power cuts, heat, humidity and the truant monsoon. Ironically, summer—and how it pans out for a group of youngsters—seemed to be the theme uniting a couple of films at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, that I managed to view remotely.

Yohan Manca’s La Traviata, My Brothers and I, that features in the festival’s official selection in the Un Certain Regard section, devoted to “unusual styles and non-traditional stories” and young and emerging filmmakers, is about 14-year-old Nour and his three older brothers living in a poor and rundown council estate in the South of France, taking care of their comatose mother, while trying hard to make ends meet.

The working-class neighbourhood, also populated with a sizeable number of immigrants, is a world of simmering discontent, tensions, violence and petty crime. Summer vacation is when Nour hopes that he’d be able to bring in a change and escape this fractious reality to the world he dreams of inhabiting. But it’s not so easy after all.

The older brother wants him to quit studies and get the job of a pizza delivery boy. There is community service work that he is saddled with, on the other hand. And, in the middle of it all, is the passion for music that he has imbibed by singing to his soporose mother who had once been a fan of the Italian opera.

“Knowing that our parents and our ancestors had an artistic sensibility is no small thing. The remnant of the past is a theme that imposed itself naturally when I wrote the screenplay. Nour also has a family and musical history; he’s both imbued with it and wants to honour it,” explained filmmaker Manca in an interview.

The dream and the alternative reality seem close at hand when Nour gets an opportunity to take summer classes with opera singer Sarah. But will the going be as smooth as he would have liked it to be?

“I wasn’t looking for ‘local colour’, but rather, for universality, so that the film could be assimilated to any suburb in the world,” said Manca. In that sense it is a familiar tale of arts as an escape from the harsh realities of life.

What makes it interesting is the choice of situating the story in the world of the opera. “I thought that it would be amazing to combine an art that’s often considered the most elitist with a working-class environment. I felt that I was on an interesting track when a producer whom I was talking to about my project replied: ‘opera doesn’t belong in lower-income neighbourhoods!’ But that’s simply not true!” said Manca.

There’s poignancy in how Nour and the brothers, despite the day-to-day trauma, care for the mother. Music is what connects Nour to her. Music is a refuge and a healer here for a child living on the margins of the society, regularly humiliated and hounded. It brings peace, joy and strength in the midst of dissonance and volatility.

What makes the film stand apart is the gradual transformation of Nour and the chameleon-like young actor, Maël Rouin-Berrandou, who brings the character alive on screen. Music makes him open up and learn to smile. It helps him get a sense of self and a direction in life.

The nicest bits are about the singing itself. How to increase the lung capacity and lengthen the breath; how imitating a well-known singer, in this case Luciano Pavarotti, can help you find your own voice. Singing is a discipline and also a guardian, liberator and the ultimate saviour of an embattled soul. The film doesn’t quite show us where life will take Nour. What it does promise is change and hope.

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A similar open-endedness underlines the experimental chronicle of summertime in Pascal Tagnati’s I Comete A Corsican Summer, playing in the parallel section ACID. It’s about residents of and visitors to the village of Corsica spending time in the shades of the surrounding mountains while the sun blazes on.

The film is entirely built around scattered conversations between various groups of people across different age groups. They transpire in varied settings—from a home to the parties to the street corners. The topics of discussions range from faith to football, sex to the insecurities in life—of having to lose it all in life and forced to start all over again. There is no drama, no tension, just incessant chatter of multiple characters.

Through them the film conveys a sense of community, ingenuously at that. The scenes are vignettes, little slices of life, with no beginning, middle or ending, just evocations of a continuum that essentially is what existence is all about. Or as Tagnati himself puts it: “Life carries on”. A case of cinema imitating life most faithfully.