Marvin ou la belle éducation

Directed by Anne Fontaine

Starring: Finnegan Oldfield, Isabelle Huppert, Grégory Gadebois

Year: 2017

Country: France

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

"It's a classic."

What did the affair of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein teach us?

What are the relationships between the aspiring young actors or actresses and the powerful men of the cinema? Are there any limits?

Marvin could answer, a young Frenchman ready to face a cynical world. Marvin is the protagonist of the film Marvin ou la belle éducation by the director Anne Fontaine presented at the 74th Venice Film Festival.

The film has nothing new, it proceeds with a language and classical structures, rather old, without manifesting any voice stronger or different. The director has in her hands a beautiful story, an interesting subject but chooses the banality trend.

Vosges is a village in a mountainous area in France, near the border with Germany. Marvin is a boy with red hair. He's shy, he's hiding, he's the favourite prey for school bullies. He's gay too, he stays a long time watching the kids in swimming suits.

In the school he is hated but the situation in the family is not better. In reality, he is loved inside house but his family is a disaster. They are poor, they live in a messy and dirty house. The father is a rude male chauvinist, he screams horrible words in underwear while the mother is out of his mind.

It is not a nice environment for a homosexual boy with dreams different from those of other arrogant boys.

Casually he comes into contact with the theatre and turns into his dream.

So he leaves for Paris, the great capital, the cultural centre not only of France.

Marvin, a teenager, arrives in Paris to the search of a job in an environment, strongly competitive, without money. But it is astute and immediately identify the only solution to be famous: to use the sensibility of a powerful man, i.e., to approach an affluent rich old man and then to discharge him after the reached goal. Among the man's friends, there is even Isabelle Hupper, played by herself, who motherly helps him.

He reaches the success bringing his play about the relationship with the father to the theatre.

The film is vital for the many flashbacks of Marvin with his family.

It is the energetic part, dynamic because the figure of the father is the most intense and exciting.

Unfortunately, the author prefers to focus on the unpleasant Marvin, representing his father as a stupid. In reality, he is the most repressed and exploited person. He is the really abused one, not by the bullies, but he is humiliated, disgusted by everyone, including his son Marvin. His father is the victim of social distortions, exploitation. It is the exploited Marxist worker.

In Marvin's house, the TV is always on, the mother talks to herself while her father is silent. His outburst is breaking a chair with his hands.

The author shows this environment, where Marvin grew up, in contrast to the beautiful world of Parisian culture, useless and boring bourgeois, frequented by Marvin for speculative purposes.

The film beyond flashbacks is full of diagonal views, matching cut with the voice-over and above all of many cross-eyed looks between the young and adult Marvin.