Writer: Marine Atlan, Anne Brouillet and Wilhelm Jensen
Director: Marine Atlan
If you’ve ever thought that teachers aren’t paid nearly enough, then Marine Atlan’s debut film La Gravita screening at the BFI London Film Festival will certainly add further conviction as more than a beleaguered Latin teacher takes a group of 20 teenagers on a trip to Pompeii. Overlong and a little too in love with its subject matter leading to long discussions, Atlan however captures the concerns, interests and challenges of being a teenager and the difficulty of understanding yourself and others.
Best friends Toni and James cause plenty of upset on a school trip abroad, too cool to engage with the art, history or lessons on offer. As the trip unfolds, Toni becomes more academically isolated, frustrating teacher Madame Mercier who reaches the end of her tether with a group largely interested in teasing each other, sex and themselves.
La Gravida for the most part is a really interesting examination of being a teenager and Atlan is particularly adept at capturing their conversations, played in long, natural-feeling conversations with multiple participants scattered through the film discussing everything from why a specific boy hasn’t responded to them, to the politics of education and the perceived flaws in their classmates, sometimes even the exploration of the art in Pompeii. And these are often largely insightful set piece moments that offer up as much vulnerability as they do bravado or self-absorption as the group dynamic reveals itself.
And within that there are some big questions about whether individual paths are fixed or can be changed, so as Atlan allows loyalties to change and blasé attitudes to reveal a more scholarly track than the surface suggest, La Gravida revels its depths. It is also full of the sadly universal ideas of cool and uncool students, of bullying and comparing yourself against others, but its nice to see girls being more supportive of one another, even with someone outside their group, while the boys are thoughtlessly cruel – a state pushed further by the compassion eventually required from unexpected sources.
The film is at least 20-minutes too long, heading for a melodramatic conclusion that is insufficiently seeded and a little unlikely given what has come before, taking away from its subtler achievements. Colas Quignard’s Toni is kinder and gentler than he pretends, a disruptor who is eventually inspired, while there is also sensitive work from Suzanne Gerin as Suzanne, the outsider bullied and ignored but finding her own agency. This film is as much as about Antonia Buresi’s exhausted Madame Mercier, the teacher feeling increasingly compromised by her charges and desperately wanting to inspire someone. There’s a lot to unpick here but it’s a promising debut.
La Gravida is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
