‘Forever Young’ Film Review: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Semi-Autobiographical Tale Is Painfully Familiar
thewrap.comValeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” is a fictionalised account of her time at Les Amandiers, a prestigious acting school in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris.
As well as drawing on her own memories of student-dom in the mid-1980s, she and her co-writers, Noémie Nvovsky and Agnes De Sacy, interviewed other people who studied alongside her, and so their tragedy-tinged comedy drama, which is in Competition at Cannes, should have all the unruly specificity of real life.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.
If you’ve ever seen a film about performing arts students – the sort of people who are going to live forever and who are going to learn how to fly (high) – then you’ll have seen it all before.Like all of said films, “Forever Young” begins with audition scenes – and it does have some fun sequences in which the histrionic would-be thesps bare their souls (and in one case, breasts) for the amused grown-ups.
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