Writers: Jacques Akchoti and Valéry Carnoy
Director: Valéry Carnoy
Boxing films have become so much a genre of their own that the BFI had a whole season devoted to them in April of this year, at which Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes played in preview. While the Cinematic Life of Boxing features expected titles like Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Ali and the first Rocky (though none of its sequels), it’s surprisingly what’s missing. There’s no Christy, the underrated Sydney Sweeney vehicle, or the locker room drama of the British Heavyweight, both from last year. And it’s a shame that Chris Eubank’s visit to Ireland in One Night in Millstreet has fallen by the wayside.
Of course, boxing films are rarely just about boxing, and the Belgian/French Wild Foxes is no exception. Carnoy’s feature debut is more of a coming-of-age story than an examination of pugilist arts. That’s not to say that the action in the ring isn’t vibrantly shot. Indeed, the whole film drips with sweat and testosterone, centring as it does, on a group of teenage boys hoping to get to some boxing finals.
Samuel Kircher, who played Léa Drucker’s very young lover in Catherine Breillat’s dangerous Last Summer (2023), is Camille, living in a residential sports school near a wood that’s overrun with foxes. Camille is the school’s best boxer, and he’s all set to represent France at the Euro boxing finals until he falls off a dam wall and cuts open his arm. While the physical recovery is astonishingly brief, the psychological damage threatens to curtail his promising career.
All this happens in the first 20 minutes, and Carnoy’s story unfolds through quick, muscular scenes either taking place in the ring or in the hormone-heavy locker room where the boys pump fists and bump chests. Kircher’s Camille, however, is less boisterous than his comrades, who perhaps display their bravado a little too strongly in some later scenes. But, as in all boxing films, Camille’s battle isn’t with his friends or even with the opponents in the ring, but with himself.
While very authentic as a teenager, Kircher gives little away, and we never discover what is causing him to doubt his ability. There are a couple of love interests that may be taking his mind off the sport – a girl (Anna Heckel) who plays taekwondo and, improbably, the trumpet and Matteo (Faycal Anaflous), his best mate – but the reasons for his struggle to get back into the ring are sketchily drawn.
There’s also a story about foxes, too, that doesn’t quite work. Camille and Matteo go into the woods and hang strips of meat purloined from the cafeteria’s freezer on the branches of a tree and wait to watch fox cubs jump in the air to retrieve them. However, for a pastime that so intrigues the pair, we see little vulpine leaping to make the symbolism mean anything. Perhaps that’s why the tautological English title has been swapped in for La danse des renards.
The foxes in London don’t seem to fight as much as the boys do in this film. But underneath all the blood, the jabs and stinky trainers, Wild Foxes is about loyalty, and it’s a good enough hook, if not a knockout.
Wild Foxes is in cinemas 1 May. www.conic.film/wildfoxes
