Standing Tall

As we await news on what feature will open the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, last year’s opener will finally make its way to U.S. theaters next month. Standing Tall, which also picked up a few César Awards recently for Best Male Newcomer (Rod Paradot) and Best Supporting Actor (Benoit Magimel), comes from director Emmanuelle Bercot. Also starring Catherine Deneuve, it follows a troubled teen as he navigates life.

We said in our review, “Much like Dolan’s film Mommy, one of the strongest characteristics of La tête haute is its bipolarity of tone. Some may find the sporadic jumps from quiet to impassioned rather jarring, but anyone who has spent time around troubled teens knows how quickly a situation can shift from calm to hostile. Still, it only works so well here because Paradot executes these outbursts with a nuanced understanding of the adolescent mind and what makes teenagers tick. This is partially stemming, of course, from the fact that Paradot only just grew out of his adolescent years.”

Check out the trailer below.

Sixteen-year-old Malony (Rod Paradot) is surrounded by adults both callous and supportive. On the latter side is a warm-hearted court judge Florence Blaque (Catherine Deneuve) and a devoted social worker Yann (Benoît Magimel, The Piano Teacher); on the other side stand most other authority figures. Clearly a victim of circumstances and poor parenting from his basket case of a mother (Sara Forestier, The Names of Love), he’s also a bully, a brute, and a sexually violent offender. STANDING TALL refuses to entirely absolve its central character; instead, it counts on Paradot, a powerful new actor, to render him as a convincingly troubled, tempestuous soul.

Standing Tall poster

Standing Tall opens on April 1st in New York and Los Angeles.

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