Fantasia 2019, Day 17, Part 5: Les Particules
For my last movie of July 27 I crossed the street to the De Sève Cinema to take in the French-Swiss co-production Les Particules (The Particles). It’s the first fiction feature by director Blaise Harrison, who co-wrote the script with Mariette Désert. After a day of particularly frenetic movies, this was good way to end the evening; a subtler, atmospheric, intelligent, and character-based film that thoroughly succeeded at what it was trying to do.
The movie follows Pierre-André, or P.A. (Thomas Daloz), an inarticulate older teen in a small town on the Franco-Swiss border. He’s in a band, kind of, or at least has a group of friends; we see them at school, and buying drugs, and taking drugs, and wandering around. We see a romance between P.A. and a chronically ill girl named Roshine (Néa Lüders), and watch their relationship develop. It’s all good slice-of-life storytelling.
Except we also follow P.A. on a school trip into the Large Hadron Collider hundreds of feet below their village. And we come to suspect the installation might be linked to the strange things that happen over the course of the movie, slowly at first, then as the film goes on a little faster and a little more obvious. Reality changes. Things, and characters, disappear. Are the quantum-level forces of the LHC causing the world to change? Or does this have to do with mental illness? Or both?
This is a stunning movie, in its sound and images, but also in the way it brings out the sense of lived experience and everyday life. And then again in the way that everyday life fits into a symbolic pattern, exploring many meanings of ‘particles’ in human existence and in the larger world. So the first shot is a view from above of the countryside as P.A. takes the bus to school: lights of houses, here and there, against the darkness of the night, glowing particles in blackness. And so, later, Christmas tree lights are something similar. So also is snow, as winter and the school year wind on.
But the crucial point, I think, is that the youths we see in the film are particles themselves, fitting into the school system, fitting (or not fitting) into society, bouncing off each other in unexpected collisions. P.A.’s relationship with Roshine is symbolically matter and anti-matter meeting. The hard physics of the LHC provide the underpinning for a metaphor that gives the material of the film some unity.