by Mathuson Anthony
Salt-dewed, and heat-flushed, a boy, James, runs down the length of a dock before mounting an overturned rowboat to jump into the ocean. His head emerges from the waves and he shouts that he thinks he broke the hull from the force of his jump. His friend Toni investigates. A sickle-shaped crack has formed. Someone says James should own up to it; James argues that it was probably already cracked. He only made it worse.
“What does it mean to leave a trace?” is the assignment tasked to La Gradiva’s ensemble of classmates on a trip to Pompeii. It’s the kind of premise that in less deft hands could feel clunky and ham-fisted, but with Marine Atlan’s grace it reaches near transcendence. In the final days of their last year of public schooling before college, memory casts a wide shadow over the group, one that obscures, provides shelter to hide beneath, and changes shape. What remains, the film asks, and how much can what remains actually tell us?
At Pompeii, even preservation fails to secure meaning. Gathered around the cast of a prone woman, the students’ teacher, Madame Mercier, explains that the figure had historically been misunderstood as pregnant. In terror, the woman had arched her back, pushing her stomach forward at an unnatural angle. The archaeologists saw what they expected to see. The body remained; the truth of the woman did not.
The same problem resurfaces among the frescoes. A match of verbal ping-pong over the scenes painted on the walls gradually becomes an argument over whether an image can ever tell us the truth of what it depicts. Description slips almost imperceptibly into interpretation: what can be seen, what can be inferred, what must simply be invented. Atlan repeatedly returns to this gap between the trace and the story built around it, between evidence and the desire to make evidence explain us.
The film opens on another set of images: a villa, surrounding foliage, a family. Toni keeps the photographs folded in his wallet. They arrive to him as proof of an illustrious Italian bloodline, evidence that his family once possessed something grand before an earthquake destroyed the estate and sent his grandmother elsewhere. Among his classmates, Toni uses the story as leverage. He may not be affluent now, but look where he came from.
The photographs matter less for what they prove than for what Toni needs them to prove. They provide him with a stable origin, something solid enough to build a self upon. When that understanding collapses, the images remain unchanged. It is only their meaning that has shifted. His illusions shattered, Toni walks down to the pier, pushes a rowboat into the water, and leans back.
Speaking about Toni’s fate, Atlan stressed that she wanted to preserve both his own failures and those of the group around him—that what happens cannot be reduced to either individual weakness or collective neglect.
In a discussion with director Jacqueline Lentzou, Atlan cited Freud’s conception of Pompeii as a site of the unconscious: the buried thing not destroyed, but preserved beneath the surface. La Gradiva, though, seems less interested in whether the past survives than in whether survival makes it legible. Everyone in Atlan’s cast is excavating someone else, searching for stable footing from which to define themselves, for relationships through which they might understand themselves in context. But excavation here rarely produces certainty. More often, it leaves another fragment in the hand, something that seems to explain a life until it doesn’t.
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Mathuson Anthony is a New York City–based writer and bartender. His work has appeared in ExPat Press, World Hunger, Do Not Submit!, Some Words, and the Michigan City Review of Books.