David Lanzmann’s new film, Wild Days, is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s a fast-paced indie film with sex, drugs and violence. But it never falls into action/thriller cliches. At its heart, this is a profound study of human nature and human character, and these characters are sure to stay with you for a long time. The story is unpredictable, thoughtful and at times heart wrenching.
We’re immediately pulled in by scenes of a coke dealer who doesn’t do coke, and the babysitter fending off her lecherous employer. Then we’re treating to a pair of traders who buy and sell vast quantities of stock while admiring Kim Kardashian’s posterior on Instagram.
Wild Days follows twenty two year old Eva, a strikingly beautiful student played by Lola Aubrière, who’s just arrived in Paris from Tours. She’s not extremely sophisticated – she’s never heard of soothsaying, but she knows who Jimmy the comedian is – but she’s making her way in the world. After learning a shocking secret about her, Eva soon gets mixed up in a complex love triangle. On the one hand, there is the much older Romain, played by Redouanne Harjane, a lonely stock trader who wants to help Eva any way he can. And on the other hand we have Manu, played by Alain-Fabien Delon, a cocaine dealer who’s only dealing to make enough to start a legitimate business of his own. While Romain becomes hopelessly infatuated with Eva, Eva and Manu become more or less a regular couple.
The plot of Wild Days, though, is not really what interests us, or Lanzmann, most. We have three complex characters here, and the audience is constantly forced to question their assumptions about these characters’ motives. We might be tempted at first to believe, as Romain does, that Eva has a heart of gold. But we’re never entirely sure if this is the case. She’s clearly out for herself and I found myself wondering at some points if she really cared about anyone other than herself.
At a party with Manu and famous comedian, she tells Manu she wants to stay when he says he has to go. Her real motive is to speak with the comedian, Jimmy, to see if he can help her get ahead somehow. We get the impression – never verified – that she’d be ready to ditch Romain and Manu in a second if Jimmy had been more forthcoming. Jimmy, though, who plays the classical part of the wise fool or jester, sees right through her. He knows that Eva doesn’t really know what she wants and that she’s trying to parlay her good looks for some sort of extraordinary life. But Jimmy wants nothing to do with her. He tells her that no one has real friends in this industry, and we wonder if Jimmy’s advice could apply to nearly the whole world. His is the voice of reason. Eva isn’t alone in her moral ambiguity. None of the characters are straightforward here, and there are no good guys or bad guys. But these are, mostly, characters we feel for even if we don’t particularly like them. Everyone here seems out for themselves, even though they don’t seem to fully realize it themselves.
The acting, the cinematography, the soundtrack are all superb. In a way, this film is a snapshot of a section of life in Paris that most of us don’t know about. The beautiful young things who seem to have it all together getting mixed up with the criminal underworld, the well-to-do cocaine addicts. We see the city from its most expensive hotel rooms, exclusive bars and nightclubs. If this were a silent film, it would be beautiful enough to watch without sound. And the story is strong enough that we’d be able to follow it without sound, too. The soundtrack, though, helps to propel the film along on stream of bouncy EDM. There are very memorable scenes here. Manu visiting his father in jail, the first demand for cash, Romain blowing Manu off after saying he’d help out.
Overall, this is a film that deserves widespread viewing. It’s thought provoking but no ‘art house’ as to put off the general public, and it’s fast-paced enough to thrill any audience.
by: Darida Rose
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.