Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva—winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize—begins from a familiar cinematic premise: a school trip abroad for a busload of restless teenagers temporarily freed from the surveillance of home. Yet the film steadily slips from the gravitational pull of genre. The phrase “teen movie” tends to conjure the noisy architecture of comedy or horror—locker-room farce, hormonal panic, slasher-movie bloodshed—and, more recently, the issue-oriented earnestness of coming-out narratives or school-shooting dramas. Atlan’s remarkable debut instead concerns itself with something more elusive and difficult to dramatize: the murky psychological territory between childhood and adulthood, where identity is still provisional and intimacy shifts shape by the hour. Her characters resemble recognizable archetypes—the brooding outsider, the sexually adventurous couple, the shy observer—but never calcify into caricature. The dynamics remain unstable, constantly rearranging themselves with the volatility of adolescence itself.
La Gradiva follows a group of French high-school students on a class trip to Naples, Italy, where they are meant to study Mount Vesuvius and frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries. The educational framework quickly recedes into the background, overtaken by the charged social ecosystem of the students themselves. The opening scene immediately establishes the uneasy mixture of curiosity, eroticism, and alienation that animates the film: James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) and Angela (Hadya Fofana) have sex inside a roomette while Toni (Colas Quignard) watches from outside, under the silent gaze of Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin). This moment possesses none of the sensationalism one might expect from contemporary youth cinema. Instead, Atlan observes the scene with an almost anthropological calm, attentive less to scandal than the fragile asymmetries of desire.
The students perform the repertoire of adulthood with startling confidence. They drink, smoke, take drugs, and drift casually into sex, behaviors that initially seem shocking not because they are unfamiliar in films about teenagers, but because Atlan presents them without moral punctuation. Yet La Gradiva makes equally clear how emotionally unequipped these adolescents remain. Their teacher, Mme. Mercier (Antonia Buresi), struggles to keep them attentive during lectures, her authority dissolving beneath chatter and boredom. In one telling episode, the students assemble a grotesque communal punch from alcohol, oranges, peppers, cigarette butts, and whatever else lies within reach, then pool money for whoever is willing to drink it. The concoction becomes a miniature portrait of adolescence itself: reckless, performative, half-disgusted with its own bravado.
At La Gradiva‘s center is the evolving relationship between Toni and James, which initially carries the easy shorthand of inseparable male friendship before gradually revealing deeper currents of longing and estrangement. Toni secretly watches James with Angela, then later cruises Grindr and hooks up with a local adult man, an encounter presented with quiet unease. Atlan resists reducing the moment to a lesson or trauma narrative. The experience is instead an increment in Toni’s mounting emotional confusion, his unrequited attachment to James refracted through desire, jealousy, and loneliness. Adolescence in La Gradiva emerges not as liberation but as a dawning awareness of one’s own opacity to others.
For Toni, this Naples trip also carries the weight of family mythology. A Neapolitan-French teenager, he arrives with a personal investment not shared by classmates. The film opens with faded photographs from his family archive, including one said to depict his grandparents posing before a castle in Naples. During the bus ride, Toni recounts a family legend: his grandmother worked there as a servant, became pregnant by her employer, and ultimately fled after the 1980 earthquake. That story hangs over La Gradiva like inherited folklore, binding questions of class, migration, and memory to Toni’s restless search for belonging. When he eventually ventures alone in pursuit of the castle, his excursion feels less like rebellion than a pilgrimage towards an unstable personal history.
A veteran cinematographer making her directorial debut, Atlan demonstrates extraordinary sensitivity to physical space and texture. Working with natural light, saturated colors, and a richly layered depth of field, she transforms Naples into more than a picturesque backdrop. The city’s weathered streets, volcanic terrain, and ancient artwork lend the film a sedimentary sense of history, as though centuries of human desire and catastrophe linger just beneath the surface of these teenagers’ seemingly trivial interactions. That contrast is quietly devastating: adolescent dramas unfolding against ruins that have already survived empires, eruptions, and generations of loss.
Music, supervised by Hippocampus, becomes another essential layer of La Gradiva‘s emotional architecture. The eclectic selections never feel decorative or overly insistent. Most haunting are the trumpet renditions of compositions by Erik Satie, whose melancholy restraint mirrors the film’s own emotional register: tender, searching, perpetually unresolved.
What ultimately distinguishes La Gradiva is the rigor beneath its apparent looseness. In several quietly riveting scenes, the students drift into conversations about sexism, racism, and politics that reveal their simultaneous sincerity and helplessness. These are young people who have grown up hearing the language of diversity, meritocracy, and social progress, only to begin realizing how little control they possess over the structures surrounding them. Its ensemble cast, largely comprising non-professional actors alongside the excellent Buresi, delivers performances of striking naturalism that deepen the film’s vérité texture. Atlan captures adolescence not as innocence lost, but as consciousness arriving all at once—thrilling, humiliating, and impossible to contain.
La Gradiva premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by 1-2 Special.