‘Red Rocks’ Cannes Review: Bruno Dumont’s Warmest Film Yet Is A Sun-Soaked Ode To Childlike Wonder
The French director turns his camera on a group of five-year-olds roaming a sun-drenched French Riviera town, entirely on their own. In Directors’ Fortnight.
At its core, Red Rocks is an exercise and something of an experiment. Directed by Bruno Dumont, the film features an almost entirely wordless cast of very young children — five and six-year-olds, mostly — who carry the story on the strength of pure action alone. Mini-conflicts arise and the kids deal with them as best they can, with the unguarded instinct of children who haven’t yet learned to overthink anything. The result is a gentle, tender film — and, despite its risks and the occasional flash of violence, a surprisingly warm one, coming from a filmmaker who has accustomed us to considerably darker registers.
If there is a protagonist in Red Rocks — perhaps because he is the most charismatic, the blondest, or simply the one whose face speaks most eloquently — it’s Geo (Kaylon Lancel), a tiny but fearless kid who rides electric tricycles, scrambles up towering rocks, and launches himself into the sea without a second thought. The town where these children live sits on the French Riviera, not far from Cannes, and its rocky coastline is genuinely beautiful — though it also feels quietly suspended in time. Dumont constructs this space in such a way that adults are nearly absent. Only a train, crossing a bridge overhead and coming and going with quiet regularity, seems to have carried them all away, leaving the place entirely to the children.
Geo shares his days with Manon (Louise Podolski) and Rouben (Mohamed Coly), his usual companions in their wandering through town — down to the beach, into the water, up onto the high rocks from which they leap without hesitation. It’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t recommend even to adults who knew the terrain well. But these kids move through it all without fear: swimming, jumping, running, as if this small coastal town were paradise itself.
They don’t talk much among themselves. Their dialogue is sparse and fragmented, stripped down to essentials. What passes for conflict arrives when the trio crosses paths with three slightly older children who also move as a pack: Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), B (Alessandro Piqeura), and Do (Meryl Piles). The trouble comes by way of jealousy — Eve and B are something like a couple, and it quickly becomes apparent that Geo has his eye on the same girl, which puts him in what appears to be genuine danger. Not that it will stop him from going to see her, whatever the consequences.
But the romantic thread is secondary to what the film is ultimately about: an exploration of a kind of childhood that feels almost anachronistic in the present day, closer to science fiction than to lived reality. Small children moving freely through a town, alone, without incident — playing, running, swimming, and yes, taking the sorts of risks any parent would immediately shut down if they were around. Carlos Alfonso Corral’s cinematography amplifies that sense of inhabiting a place that is real and yet, somehow, subtly impossible.
Red Rocks has no interest in realism, or at least not the conventional kind. If anything, it plays with a heightened realism in which the true story lives in the faces of these children — the protagonist’s above all, rich with unguarded nuance — and in what the camera catches of their movements and their bodies in space. Plot is beside the point. The film is the kids, the sea, the sun, the beach, and the rocks.
