Critics reviews

Bercot moves the action along with unsteady, staccato rhythms that juggle Malony's simmering rage with his yearning for an ordinary life. By the end of this kindly film we want to give it to him, and though it's easy enough to write off the climax as frankly wishful, Bercot has cunningly stashed a nascent gift in the prologue to Standing Tall. This tortured young man has an innate talent that will help him earn the future she has bestowed on him, and send his helper into retirement resting easy.

Bercot displays little awareness of how troubling the dynamic is here, especially since Malony's act not only goes unmentioned, but is seemingly forgiven by Tess, who winds up having sex with Malony several more times. Without pairing these narrative developments with a conscious statement on the ways gender dynamics can complicate sexual desire, Standing Tall quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.

Standing Tall also lays out its agenda through predictable situations and dialogue... It's in the few scenes when Bercot strays away from her overtly traditional aesthetics that the film communicates something genuine about Malony, something that doesn't denounce the lack of synchrony between the misery depicted on screen and the privilege of the ones architecting the filmic image.

[Bercot] directed the tepid social drama Standing Tall, which played out of competition on opening night.

Emmanuelle Bercot's Standing Tall was a fairly well-executed account of a troubled youth's journey through France's judicial and social-services system and as such was hardly standard opening-gala fare, but in the end it did provide an improbably feel-good, literally paternalistic resolution.

Bercot's film locates itself at an awkward mid-point between social realism and sentiment – it's medicine and sugar mixed up in the same spoonful, and it doesn't work nearly as well here as it did in Ken Loach's similarly themed Sweet Sixteen... It does, however, boast a central performance that's worth getting excited about. Paradot captures Malony's coiled anger beautifully.

The exhaustion one feels after witnessing Malony's unconvincing rise and fall and rise again toward adulthood is palpable and unrelenting. Bercot's camera feels like a sideline referee trying to make sense of characters it doesn't understand.

Bercot's juvenile justice-system drama — a clumsy, histrionic back-patter about well-intentioned bureaucrats trying to save a distressingly unruly youth from himself — features an underwritten love interest ("tomboy") who fails the Bechdel test long before she's pulled off an abortion operating table by her male lover.

As opening-night offerings go, "La Tête Haute," which has the flat English title "Standing Tall," was perfectly watchable, although anyone who's sampled the Sundance Film Festival might find its story about an at-risk youth overly familiar. Among the differences that separate a lot of delinquent sob stories from this one is that it has Catherine Deneuve as a kindly judge, and here the system actually works, so much so that it ends with the former bad boy walking tall under a French tricolor.

The result is a piece of cinema that defiantly ducks any moment of epiphany or revelation. The endless whirring of the plot fits the endless whirring of the social task at hand for those in compassionate roles. Bercot's studious commitment to relaying a treadmill reality at times tasks the attention span. Yet for the most part, Standing Tall refreshes through its lack of refreshment.

The use of classical music (Bach, Schubert, Arvo Pärt) is gratingly on-the-nose. Visually too, the film, though polished enough, often feels somewhat functional. But Standing Tall can't be faulted for energy and for seriousness - and offers a rare case of a troubled-teen drama in which the justice system is seen as entirely benevolent, and a source of succour to troubled souls. A cast of young supporting unknowns enhances the realist rawness.

Though it has some clumsy narrative ellipses and some woefully obvious musical choices (Arvo Pärt's Spiegel mit Spielge and the second movement from Schubert's E-flat piano trio are merely the most predictable), the film does get by thanks to the strength of the performances throughout, but particularly those of Magimel and Deneuve.