By Dylan B Jones
Rating: ***
After a limited release in France last year, this thoughtful and at times harrowing French drama is hitting UK cinemas this September.
It’s the work of acclaimed director Anne Fontaine (The Innocents, Coco Before Chanel) and follows the story of Martin Bijou, who flees the bleak rural reality of his childhood for aspirational hedonism in Paris.
The film flits between his troubled upbringing and his more glamorous but still troubled young adulthood in the city. The actors playing both incarnations of Marvin do a startlingly stirring job – Jules Poirier heartbreakingly awkward and naïve as young Marvin, and Finnegan Oldfield entrancing and intense as older Marvin.
Something Reinventing Marvin captures with visceral accuracy, is the first stirrings of desire we all go through in our adolescence; Marvin sits dumbstruck on the side of his school swimming pool, while older, more developed boys flip and play like dolphins.
His home life in a non-descript village in the countryside is also painted with painfully detailed despair. The walls are sparse, the dinners even sparser. His father, while not physically abusive, is willfully apathetic and engrained with homophobia, describing it as “a perversion.”
There’s a nice moment when Marvin returns as a young adult, and his father acknowledges that gay people can get married now, asking with a smile if Marvin is married – the implication being that people can, and do, change.
While the cast act with seemingly effortless assuredness, and the Marvin’s world is portrayed in wonderfully vivid detail, the one thing that lets the film down slightly is it’s bizarrely hammy dialogue. For 2018’s discerning and weathered audiences, lines like “what matters is what’s deep down inside us” and “What do I want? In my drink or in my life?” just don’t fly, not even in French.
Occasional cheesiness aside, it’s still an evocative and eminently watchable portrait of a young gay man’s experiences in France. And let’s not forget the always welcome addition of Isabelle Huppert, who turns up as herself, cigarettes and prossecco flutes abound, and she takes young gay Marvin under her wing. Let’s be honest, that alone is enough reason to watch any movie., and it’s unignorably passionate.
Reinventing Marvin, released by Peccadillo Pictures, is in cinemas from 14th September.
