French writer Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt — France’s highest-profile literary award — for his 2018 novel “And Their Children After Them,” a working-class Bildungsroman set against a backdrop of severe deindustrialization, for which he stated his disparate influences to include John Steinbeck, Émile Zola, Bruce Springsteen and the 2012 Jeff Nichols film “Mud.” The Springsteen namecheck is easily taken care of in this brash big-screen adaptation, via a thuddingly obvious needle-drop as its bike-riding hero straps his hands across some engines and hits the open road. Mathieu’s more literary allusions, however, haven’t survived the journey to Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma’s overlong, outwardly emotive but strangely unmoving film, which resorts to soap-opera mechanics in its saga of three youths variously affected over a six-year period by one rash act of teen delinquency.
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The Boukherma twins showed some inventive, genre-jumbling verve in their first three features — most prominently “Teddy,” a kind of postmodern werewolf comedy starring a brilliant Anthony Bajon, which cracked the official selection of Cannes’ called-off 2020 edition. Brawny in scope and scale, with emotions writ if not felt large, “And Their Children After Them” (more simply titled “Leurs enfants après eux,” without that dangling initial conjunction, in the original French) feels like the brothers’ big bid for mainstream respectability. It may well be a popular hit on home turf, if not elsewhere, where Mathieu’s novel hasn’t anything like the same cultural cachet. Venice has obligingly boosted the Boukhermas’ auteur stock with a competition slot for their latest, though the film leaves them looking a little callow in that context.
In its tone, subject and overall shape, the film bears a coincidental resemblance to Gilles Lellouche’s recently Cannes-premiered “Beating Hearts,” another supersized, commercially-minded youth melodrama that out of place in a major festival competition, though it’s a bit rougher at the edges. As in that film, the setting is an unnamed industrial town in eastern France, where once-thriving business has given way to widespread unemployment, while rusting factory skeletons loom large on the flat landscape.
In the summer of 1992, cocky, charismatic teen Anthony (Paul Kircher) assumes the place will soon be behind him: Until then, he’s passing the time by partying, flirting and avoiding the ire of his gruff alcoholic father Patrick (Lellouche, as it happens, overdoing it somewhat), the very model of the man Anthony aspires not to be. One glittering sunny day at the local lake, he meets and is immediately smitten by Steph (Angélina Woreth), a slightly older middle-class girl whose university plans don’t match with his more unformed ideas of escape. When she invites him to a house party way across town, he’s there with bells on — borrowing Patrick’s prize motorcycle without permission, for extra cred.
His bravado backfires when he butts heads at the party with Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), a similarly abused and combative tearaway from an immigrant Moroccan family. As payback for the altercation, Hacine steals the already stolen bike — prompting a panicked attempt by Anthony and his beleaguered mother Hélène (Ludivine Sagnier) to retrieve it before Patrick notices it’s missing. A confrontation between the two families, with a resulting loss of face for Hacine, only worsens matters: The bike is duly returned, in flames, while Hacine is sent back to the motherland as punishment.
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So much for the summer, then. But we’re just getting started, as “And Their Children After Them” goes on to trace the fallout of these events over three more summers, each spaced two years apart, while never leaving — in a simplification of Mathieu’s novel, and a crushing spoiler alert for Anthony’s dreams — this dingy town of trampled souls. By 1994, Anthony is still living at home, his spirit already wilting in menial jobs, and only the army beckoning as an alternative. Steph finds that college is not all it’s cracked up to be. Hacine returns to France with drug money and a hunger for revenge that will be volleyed back and forth across the film’s baggy 144-minute running time.
With the novel’s socioeconomic commentary and class conflict largely stripped from the Boukhermas’ adaptation, these characters and their problems aren’t substantial enough to sustain a film that fancies itself a modern urban epic of sorts. Despite the efforts of a talented young cast, Anthony, Steph and Hacine feel more like attractive demographic representatives than fully flesh-and-blood characters with raging desires and chaotic hormones. The script is strangely timid in addressing the clear racial tension between the two young men, while a subplot detailing Hacine’s underworld trajectory peters out with little payoff. The relationship between Anthony and Steph, meanwhile, is fashioned as a grandly star-crossed romance, but we’re never persuaded that the couple’s connection runs all that deep. For all three, one suspects, the next six years might prove a steeper learning curve.
Where the the writing is wan, the filmmaking compensates with emphatic braggadocio. Augustin Barbaroux’s cinematography is all humidly saturated tones and rolling, kinetic movement; in a Bastille Day sequence, the film pauses to watch an extended firework display, as if marveling at its own flash and dazzle. Production and costume design are tackily on point for the period (with special credit to the hairstyling team for their timewarp treatment of Kircher’s lush, center-parted boyband mop) but more than one scene is scuppered by the directors’ intemperate, often over-literal use of era-appropriate rock standards by Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith and more. Matters reach a head, or a nadir, when a children’s-choir cover of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” soundtracks one character’s crescendoing anguish: The ’90s may have been an age of irony, but one suspects the film is operating in deadly earnest here, and deadeningly so.
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