Algeria means little to the bright, sensitive Francois (Gael Morel), who loves Ingmar Bergman films and Faulkner and is just beginning to discover that his sexual desires focus not on his pretty best friend Malte (Bouchez), but on the handsome peasant boy Serge (Stephane Rideau), whose brother has just been sent to Algeria to fight. One brief schoolboy sexual encounter means everything to Francois, but it’s just a one-time experiment to Serge, who’s smitten with Maite. Complicating these sexual and class matters is the arrival of Henri (Frederic Gorny), a right-wing pied noir-a French citizen born in Algeria and forced to leave Noah Africa because of the war, Sophisticated, self-destructive and seething with bitterness at his exile, Henri brings the volatile political passions of the outside world to this provincial enclave. He, too, is drawn to Maite, though everything in his fiercely nationalistic nature despises her communist sympathies, which she’s inherited from her parents. In the sexual and political civil wars of these four teenagers, “Wild Reeds” discovers a microcosm of a society whose center no longer holds.
A major French director, Techine’s films (“French Provincial”) have rarely been seen in the United States. He’s always been the master of a fluid cinematic style, but some of his films have seemed no more than chic surface. Not here. Working with semiautobiographical material and from an honest, finely detailed screen-play (by Techine, Olivier Massart and Gilles Taurand), he reconstructs the passions of youth with clear-eyed, deeply engaged sympathy. Every character–not just the kids, but the teachers as well–comes alive with a complexity worthy of Jean Renoir. The lyricism of “Wild Reeds” doesn’t cast a smoke screen of nostalgia, it brings us closer to the experience of adolescence. Though they dance to the Beach Boys and the Platters, and obsess about their crushes and confusions, Francois, Maite and Henri seem worlds apart from the 1902 teenagers in American Graffiti." Their precocious self-awareness is specifically French, and it serves to protect them against the storms of childhood’s end. Like the reed in the La Fontaine fable that gives the movie its title, these kids learn to bend without breaking.
