The Great Denial: How Three Movies in Cannes Depicted AIDS From a Teen Perspective

The Cannes Film Festival has always been a place where societal and political issues can resonate through cinema. As a curious coincidence for this 78th edition, three different filmmakers – two women born in the eighties, one man born in the mid-nineties – chose to confront themselves, each in their own way but through the point of view of teenages, to the AIDS crisis, between 1982 to 2004.

With Alpha, Julia Ducournau, fresh from her Palme d’or for Titane, comes back in Competition with a bleak, chilling third feature. At first, the movie is the story of the young Alpha (Mélissa Boros, Sibel’s Silence), a young teen living in 1990s France, at a time when the country is suddenly affected by a strange epidemic which mutates contaminated people into marble statues. The director introduces her young protagonist to her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Monsieur Aznavour), who used to be addicted to heroin and is now trying to stay clean. But after this curious start, Ducournau’s writing struggles to find the right balance between fantasy, horror and social realism. Alpha is a bullied kid who’s starting to see the world of adults as a really scary place ; neither her mother nor her uncle seem to feel the need to clearly reassure her. The teenager’s anxieties go unaddressed, as the movie focuses on the family drama at play : Alpha’s mother is trying to save her brother at all cost. Rahim is the standout here, as his character’s fight with his addiction gives the film a heart and a purpose. Ducournau, however, misses the point with the big pandemic at the center of Alpha. It is indeed a heavy-handed metaphor for AIDS, with quite a poetic execution : the metamorphosis into marble emphasises the slow, inevitable agony of the sick. But the movie never fully embraces the whole topic of the virus. In France, like in many other countries at the time, the denial surrounding AIDS was still going strong in 1990. Ducournau grew up in this country but, even if she puts some sort of memories of that era in Alpha, it is not felt deeply enough. The movie is so focused on its family triangle (mother / child / uncle) that what it shows us of its made-up pandemic – the tragedy of it, how it affects the fabric of society, and weights on health policies – seems, in the end, superfluous.

Romería is also a third feature, this time from Spain’s Carla Simón, who won the Golden Bear for Alcarràs in 2022, and enters the main competition in Cannes for the first time in her career. Here, Simón uses some autobiographical material to tell the story of another teenager, Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), who was adopted as a child and is trying to find her roots, by meeting with her biological father’s family in Galicia. The director brings us back to a few days of July 2004, in an era without smartphones, where a landline is the only tenuous link between Marina and her adoptive family. Using her mother’s diary, she tries to understand who her parents were when she was born, and why they chose to give her up for adoption. By meeting with her young cousins, her aunts and uncles, even her grandparents, Marina starts to learn about her parents’ addictions, and her father’s “illness”, which eventually took his life… years later after her birth. Through her young and daring main character, Carla Simón confronts herself and the audience to what AIDS still represented in the early 2000s : a shameful sickness and an unspeakable secret, the kind that needs to be quickly forgotten (and not talked about) according to the patriarch. But Marina knows better : she seeks the truth. After a slow start, the greatest strength of Romería is to never stop trusting its protagonist : a teenager growing up into a responsible woman, defining right from wrong, and not letting the family secrets she uncovers undermine her identity.

Finally, presented in the parallel section of Un Certain Regard, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La Misteriosa mirada del flamenco) is the first feature by Diego Cespédes, from Chile. Set in 1982, in a small mining town isolated in the desert, the movie tells the story of an 11 year old teenager, Lidia. She grew up in a family of gay men, who run the local and popular cabaret near the town. But when a deadly disease suddenly spreads in the community, Lidia’s family is immediately accused. A curse is born : the sickness that spreads through their eyes… And so the miners organize themselves to stop the disease from spreading. With such a grim premise, one could expect a movie as bleak as Alpha. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo tries to be the opposite : a tender portrait of a young girl who watches as the world of her childhood crumbles. Lidia and the other kids are all fascinated by the curse, a way for them to talk about things they don’t fully understand but that no adult will care to explain to them. In fact, in Cespédes’ movie, adults are often as irresponsible as children, until tragedy strikes. There, the director portrays his protagonist as a human being full of love and much more mature than the men in the village. A teenager that already understands the brutal and blind violence of the disease, the need to grieve and to resist the threat of superstitions. Even if it follows a conventional “coming of age” formula, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is made with care and confidence, and manages to capture the threat of AIDS in a poetic, organic and metaphoric way, showing its wider impact on a small community to better understand how it affected society as a whole. And the movie was rightfully awarded the Un Certain Regard Prize, the biggest award in Un Certain Regard.

Michael Ghennam
©FIPRESCI