Redheaded teen Rémy (Olivier Barthélémy) is bullied by his soccer teammates and drawn into fights with his younger sister and mother in their cramped apartment. After a flare-up of domestic violence, he flees home and is tracked down by a bitter guidance counsellor, Patrick (Vincent Cassel), also a redhead. Patrick looks upon Rémy’s sullen insolence with both sympathy and disdain and decides to toughen him up. The two redheads realize that they are out of place in twenty-first century France. They have no country, no people and no army. Together they plot to take on the world in a hallucinatory quest for a land of imagined freedom.
The past months have seen the name Romain Gavras (son of Costa-Gavras the acclaimed director of Z and Missing) inserted into cinema’s hipster lexicon with the controversial and provocative music video “Born Free” by the outspoken and politically charged singer M.I.A., in which redheads are persecuted by the military.
Now with this highly anticipated feature debut, Gavras has proven he is able to effectively break out from the short form. Using the abstract notion of a tribe based on hair pigment, he examines the politics of race and class in an Old World country desperately clinging to its traditional way of life.
Cassel’s guidance counsellor is played with seething arrogance as he forces Rémy into outlandish situations, like having him imitate a Russian boxer in order to get a date with a teenaged girl. Much of Gavras’s ease with the two actors comes from their past involvement with Kourtrajamé, the Parisian art and filmmaking collective that he founded with Kim Chapiron (director of the gonzo horror film Sheitan, also starring Cassel and Barthélémy).
In Notre jour viendra, Gavras crafts a hypnotic road trip through a world of pompous morality, and sets the story against an ugly backdrop of factory towns. It makes for gritty and provocative filmmaking that will haunt you long after you’ve left the theatre. –TIFF.net
