‘I’ll Be Home in June’ Cannes Review: A Tender, Honest Portrait of an Unlikely America

What brought you to Las Cruces?» asks the father of the host family, picking up Franny (Naomi Cosma) upon her arrival. It’s a fair question. Las Cruces is a tiny New Mexico town that feels closer to the Old West than to anything resembling the modern world. And Franny is a sixteen-year-old German girl who looks every bit of it. What could go wrong?

At first, curiosity and surface-level warmth smooth everything over. Her two new «sisters» welcome her with enthusiasm, and school — where another German exchange student is doing the same program — turns out to be more welcoming than the average American high school movie would suggest. The other kids, for once, are the least of her problems.

Things begin to unravel on September 11th, in ways that seem, at first, to have nothing to do with her. But tensions slowly build at home, particularly with the parents, who grow increasingly nationalist and mildly xenophobic. Franny is white and passes unnoticed except for her accent, yet the ambient religiosity and drumbeat of war begin to wear on her. The film takes an odd turn here: school, by contrast, is a place where nearly everyone seems unusually critical of the country’s march toward conflict.

Somewhere past the midpoint —and this is a film that runs long— Franny moves to a new household, adjusts to a new family dynamic, and keeps filming everything with her camera, a device director Katharina Rivilis weaves into the visual fabric of the film. She also finds something like love: Elliott (David Flores), a quiet outsider she connects with easily. The problem is that the adults in her life don’t approve, and make no secret of it.

I’ll Be Home in June has a sharp eye for the world Franny navigates and the cultural friction she encounters along the way: the local religiosity, the family rituals, the logic of American schools (she can’t quite process the presence of police officers in the hallways), and even the smallest details of daily routine. But Franny is an easygoing, unconfrontational presence —she tends to avoid trouble rather than court it. The film follows her lead, choosing observation over conflict, accompanying her experience with the open curiosity of a European teenager dropped into the deep desert of the American Southwest.

The whole thing is steeped in the spirit of American indie cinema of the early 2000s —a look that still carries traces of the nineties, a soundtrack of alternative rock, and the particular vocabulary and rhythms of that time and place. There’s also something distinctly European about the way it sees the United States, which makes sense given that Wim Wenders serves as executive producer — a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about filming America from the outside.

At over two hours, the film outstays its welcome, and the romance may not be quite as compelling as Rivilis seems to believe, charming as its melancholy warmth is for a while. But I’ll Be Home in June never stops feeling honest — sensitive and genuinely felt, in the way that only autobiographical material tends to be. It’s a film about an American dream that looks nothing like the one in the brochures, and is, in some ways, considerably more real.