It’s hard to escape tropes in a coming-of-age story. Agathe Reidinger’s debut feature ‘Wild Diamond’ (Competition section) refreshes those tropes, and gives a film whose powerful lead character comes home with you.
Malou Khebizi as the nineteen-year-old Liane checks many familiar boxes– she is appropriately fierce and fiesty, and mouthy with it—but it also allows her to exhibit a pleasing vulnerability. Liane is a type, but she is also an individual, and therefore memorable.
Liane may live in the south of France, but you can recognise in her a universal hunger for validation. Like countless others in this age of Tik-Tok-Instagram-fuelled fame, which relies upon numbers of followers, and fawning fan comments, she is busy constructing herself, one ‘post’ after another.
She is also reconstructing her physical self. Breast augmentation procedures and lip fillers have been achieved; now she wants more padding in other parts of her body. Meanwhile, she shoplifts and barely saves herself from getting caught by the police, while hanging out with her girl-gang whose members are a mix of being combative and supportive, and reluctantly coming home to a mother who has long checked out.
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It’s unclear whether either Liane or her younger sister have had formal schooling, and it’s shocking to see the mother as the most irresponsible person in this trio: she can’t or won’t find a job, invites men who are as big slobs as her into her bed, and basically abandons her daughters to their own devices. How does Liane acquire a sense of self when she has no role model? Inflicting damage on your body is not sensible, but she goes about it with wincing determination, laying out the cuts like she is Exhibit A, hoping that people see the real her underneath.
A reality TV producer asks her to come in for an audition, offering her hope. A dress she can’t afford is bought; her dream of becoming a highly-paid ‘influencer’ seems to be coming true, and then there is radio silence from the production company. Liane’s religious compulsions, which adds an interesting layer to her personality, makes her a martyr in her own eyes, ironic for someone who worships the might of money, and things it can buy.
Khebizi’s performance– she is in practically every frame– is terrific. Even when the film begins meandering, with a putative romance which doesn’t come off well, you can’t take your eyes off Liane. She is a true diamond in the rough, and you come away hoping that things will go well for her. And for all the lost little girls looking for a way out.
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Another little girl, in a prison not of her own making, is front and centre of George Miller’s hotly-anticipated ‘Furiosa, A Mad Max Saga’, a prequel to the flat-out fabulous ‘Mad Max, Fury Road’ (2015). The latter was an astonishing feat. Miller revived his long-running Mad Max franchise with ‘Fury Road’, investing it with such energy and passion that it became an instant classic. Charlize Theron as Furiosa, led the charge from the front, never once slackening her grip on the fast-and-furious action, and the whole thing was a total blast.
Being a huge ‘Fury Road’ fan, I’m heartbroken to report that the follow-up, technically the back-story of Furiosa, has none of the zest and the zing of the older film. The vast dust-enveloped sandy vistas, filling the screen end-to-end, the weird collection of vehicles, the strange masked creatures swarming over the waterless ‘Wasteland’ are all there, but the young Furiosa takes her own sweet time coming into her own. Anna Taylor Joy plays her with slender grit, her enormous eyes almost too big for her face, but the film doesn’t give her enough play. It gets so busy with all the revving, and the roaring, and the non-stop decimation of faceless computer-generated creatures, that you feel completely uninvolved. And unmoved. I couldn’t wait for it to get over.
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