David Depesseville’s Astrakan draws on a long French tradition of sympathetic films about abused, neglected, and misunderstood children, most notably François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Small Change (1976). While Astrakan is not in the league of those films, it definitely stakes a claim as an interesting contribution to the genre from a director with a strong sense of style and a willingness to take risks.
For most of its running time, Astrakan is a naturalistic film about a troubled child living with a foster family in rural France. Twelve-year-old Samuel (Mirko Giannini, who delivers a strong performance in his second film) doesn’t seem like a trouble-maker so much as a kid who mainly wishes he could disappear. We don’t know much about his early life, but it sounds rough—his father was killed by the police, he won’t speak about his mother, and his behavior is that of a child who has already learned not to depend on anyone for anything.
Samuel’s foster parents, Marie (Jehnny Beth) and Clément (Bastien Bouillon), are open about the fact that they took him in because they need the support payments provided by the government, but they’re not really bad people so much as they’re not prepared to deal with the needs of a traumatized child. Marie sometimes becomes impatient with Samuel and what she interprets as his unreasonable demands for attention, while Clément is prone to losing his temper and using physical punishment on Samuel, but they’re not the evil step-parents out of a fairy tale so much as rural people who expect children to get along and fit in with life as it is.
A more serious threat is posed by Marie’s brother Luc (Theo Costa-Marini), who lives nearby with her parents, may be mentally slow, and definitely seems to have pedophilic tendencies. Samuel, without parents to protect him, would be a perfect victim, and Luc is all too eager to engineer reasons be alone with the boy. More alarmingly, when Samuel is sent to live with the grandparents, he has to share a bed with Luc. Granted they are poor and old-fashioned in their expectations regarding children, but given what we’ve already seen, this sleeping arrangement seems like an engraved invitation to child abuse.
Things look up a bit when Hélène (Lorine Delin), a girl from Samuel’s class, takes a fancy to him. He’s oddly passive in response to her, perhaps because he’s learned to mistrust people and knows that he’ll be blamed should things go wrong. And sure enough, when they’re discovered in a compromising situation instigated by Hélène, he’s the one who gets dragged home in disgrace.
Most of Astrakan is slow-paced and feels almost like a documentary, as if the camera were simply following some rural people through their daily routines. This tone is matched by the calm cinematography by Simon Beaufils, which contrasts the beauty of the French countryside with the sometimes pitiless world of human beings, and makes the film’s departure from naturalism all the most impactful.
When the meaning of a film title is not obvious, it’s always interesting to try to puzzle out why it was chosen. The word astrakan, also spelled astrakhan, refers to the fleece of fetal or newborn lambs from the Astrakhan region of southern Russia, which is black, lustrous and tightly curled. Samuel, although hardly a newborn, is both a metaphorical black sheep and a vulnerable child in a world full of predators. There’s also the everyday ruthlessness of farm life—while we don’t see fetal lambs being slaughtered, the matter-of-fact skinning of a rabbit in an early scene underscores the fact that country life is not for the squeamish. There are a few more relevant references to look out for, including the choice of music for the final sequence. | Sarah Boslaugh
Astrakan is available on VOD beginning September 1.
