Red Island Review: Paradise’s Ghosts Linger in Nostalgia

In his introspective semi-autobiographical film “Red Island,” writer-director Robin Campillo transports viewers to 1970s Madagascar, a tropical idyll where the sun is slowly setting on French colonial rule. Through the wide, wandering eyes of 8-year-old Thomas, we experience the halcyon daze and fraught atmosphere of a military base housing families still clinging to a fading imperialist dream.

Campillo, drawing from his own childhood experiences, nostalgically recreates this insular expatriate world while unflinchingly confronting its uncomfortable colonial backdrop. “Red Island” navigates the delicate perspectives of both the colonizers and colonized, the willfully oblivious indulgences of adults and the profound awakenings of youth. With poetic visuals and disarming performances, the film becomes a bittersweet rite of passage – not just for young Thomas, but for an entire nation shedding its shackles.

Glimpses of a Bygone Era

In the waning years of the 1970s, the tropical island of Madagascar remained an outpost of faded French colonialism. At a military base housing expatriate families, young Thomas (a wide-eyed Charlie Vauselle) spends his days spying on the enigmatic adult world surrounding him. The sensitive 8-year-old is utterly transfixed by the dramas, intrigues, and unspoken tensions simmering amongst the parents, soldiers, and officers posted at this lush paradisiacal station.

Thomas’ dashing air force officer father Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) seems to be hiding illicit indiscretions from his unhappy mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). The boy bears witness to clandestine trysts and marital strife through doors left ajar and overheard whispers. His only refuge is his love of the comic book heroine Fantômette, whose superhero exploits he avidly reads and dreams of emulating.

As Thomas comes of age, his childlike fantasies collide with harsh realities. A new soldier, Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière), scandalously takes a native Malagasy woman (Amely Rakotoarimalala) as a lover – an audacious breach of the unspoken racist codes. This relationship sparks hostilities that can no longer be ignored by the insulated French families. Their cozy colonial existence is crumbling as Madagascar rallies for complete independence, forcing introspection on horrific injustices once disregarded.

Innocence Lost, Awakening Found

Red Island poignantly juxtaposes the blissful naivete of childhood against the harsh realities and injustices of colonialism. Through young Thomas’ wandering perspective, we experience the idyllic lushness of Madagascar as both a sun-drenched playground and an occupied land seething with repressed resentments. The oblivious pursuits of the French military families – hosting decadent parties, committing infidelities, enforcing racist hierarchies – are depicted with the same sense of youthful wonder and confusion as Thomas himself.

In this stifling existential prison, the superhero fantasy world of Fantômette becomes a symbolic cry for escapism and justice. Just as the caped comic crusader battles evil, Thomas yearns to burst free from the suffocating codes and cultural myopias that entrap the adults around him. His imagination allows fleeting transcendence, with whimsical animated interludes spilling onto the screen. Yet the more Thomas bears witness to hypocrisies, the more this childhood idyll curdles into disillusionment.

Ultimately, Campillo uses the colonizer-vs-colonized dynamic to explore larger issues of oppression, marginalization and necessary upheaval. What begins as nostalgia for a paradisiacal youth warps into an unsparing examination of France’s brutal colonial legacies when confronted with the Malagasy people’s surging revolutionary spirit. Thomas’ rite of passage loses its innocence, gaining a grander, more searing universal significance.

Transporting Visuals, Transcendent Performances

On a technical level, Red Island is a masterwork of immersive, atmospheric filmmaking. Cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie bathes the lush Madagascan landscapes in a warm, nostalgic golden glow that mirrors the magic hour temperament of childhood memories.

Her camera lingers adoringly on rippling tide pools, sunbaked foliage, and swaying palms – paradisiacal imagery that subtly cloaks the more unseemly colonial dynamics happening just off-frame. This rose-tinted idyll is shattered by sudden tonal shifts into darker, moodier lighting schemes as shocking revelations disrupt the reverie.

At the film’s core is a pair of exceptional child performances that anchor the shifting perspectives. As Thomas, Charlie Vauselle effortlessly embodies the inquisitive wonderment and gradual disillusionment of a young witness to history. His naturalistic poise and emotional transparency are a triumph.

Cathy Pham as his savvy friend Suzanne exhibits a precocious self-possession, knowingly guiding the more sheltered Thomas toward harsher truths. The chemistry between the two feels spontaneous and unforced.

Campillo’s most audacious technical gambit pays off through bizarre, avant-garde interludes adapted directly from the Fantômette comic that so enraptures Thomas. Deliriously cartoonish animated sequences erupt without warning, whisking viewers into a funhouse mirror realm of oversized props, felt cityscapes and slapstick heroics. These fantasy retreats into childhood imagination both exhilarate and unsettle, jolting us out of the grit of harsh reality in unsettling ways. It’s an unconventional storytelling device, but one that reinforces Red Island’s core themes.

Fragmented Perspectives, Incomplete Insights

For all its immersive atmospheric qualities and thematic ambition, Red Island stumbles when it comes to fully cohering its myriad narrative threads and perspectives into a unified whole. Too often, the array of adult characters – from Thomas’ brooding father Robert to the scandalized Bernard – remain thinly sketched archetypes when viewed outside the limited scope of the boy’s restricted viewpoint.

More damagingly, the jarring final act shift that arcs away from Thomas’ childhood lens toward the broader liberation struggles of the Malagasy people feels disjointed from what came before. While intellectually admirable to decenter the colonizers’ experiences, this pivot lacks sufficient groundwork to feel like an organic or seamless revelation. Characters who loomed large in earlier passages become narrative ghosts.

Ultimately, one is left to wonder whether Red Island’s personal coming-of-age story and its righteous post-colonial awakening add up to a transcendent sum greater than their individual parts. The underlying themes seethe with urgency and insight, but the delicate tonal balance between nostalgia and reckoning remains slightly elusive in execution. Still, Campillo’s ambitions are admirable in eschewing a safe, sanitized take on difficult cultural histories.

Nostalgic Awakening, Uneven Introspection

Red Island stands as an admirable albeit flawed attempt to wrest profundity from the uncomfortable legacies of colonialism and cultural oppression. Director Robin Campillo ambitiously mines his own childhood experiences growing up on a French military base in 1970s Madagascar to craft a coming-of-age tale that evolves into a searing sociopolitical reckoning.

At its best, the film transports viewers into the paradisiacal yet stiflingly insular world of expatriate colonizers willfully ignorant of their dwindling governance over the island’s rightful inhabitants. Through the wandering eyes of young Thomas, we experience both the nostalgic reveries of youthful naivete and the gutting disillusionment as harsh injustices and revolutionary upheavals encroach.

However, Campillo’s fragmented narratives don’t always cohere, with certain characters flattening into underwritten stereotypes once outside of Thomas’ restricted perspective. And a last-act pivot to center the native Malagasy people’s resistance feels thematically admirable yet clumsily executed – raising profound inquiries about oppression that the film can’t quite reconcile within its nostalgic Coming-of-Age framework.

Even with its structural flaws, Red Island resonates as a visually ravishing, emotionally candid memoir of reckoning with one’s cultural blind spots. Campillo’s vulnerabilities as both artist and global citizen are laid bare in deeply compelling ways, even if his reach intermittently exceeds his grasp. An imperfect but impassioned confrontation with history’s ghosts.