Green Boys

This is a story of an encounter, a story of friendship. In the middle of flax fields and pastureland overlooking the sea, in the Pays de Caux, 13-year-old Louka and 17-year-old Alhassane play football, fish with dip nets, climb trees, give each other object lessons. Alhassane comes from afar, Louka is local, but both seem to have appeared instantaneously in the landscape – each in his own way a reincarnation of Saint-Exupery’s little prince. Day after day, they learn how to be together and, as their friendship grows, they build a hut. The hut resembles those built in Guinea, Alhassane’s country, and looks more like a bit of Africa deposited on the hillside than their childhood hideout. The ramblers passing by on the path seem to arrive there as if on a voyage. Alhassane is reluctant to sleep in the hut at night. He is scared of devils. Louka does not believe in them. But what separates them binds them together as much as what unites them. This story of little princes, one on the brink of adolescence, the other on the threshold of adulthood, is a story told through a gentle mise-en-scène, with framings open onto the horizon, shots that stretch out into the peaceful setting of a rural world seemingly devoid of all violence. Like a precious moment filmed as if outside of time, the friendship that Ariane Doublet sensitively portrays is not so much a source of hope, but rather an enchanted interlude.

Catherine Bizern