New Restoration

“A remarkable and passionate film … As a young critic for Cahiers du cinéma, Téchiné championed films in which people were presented in a mysterious, even ghostly fashion … Accordingly, these teenagers seem driven, even possessed by passions and motivations that remain stubbornly mysterious to them, and to us.”

Adrian Martin, The Age (Melbourne)

André Téchiné’s greatest film is a particularly agile and concentrated version of adolescence, one where political awareness, sexual awakening, friendly alliances, and music cues—all in flux—test the boundaries of a small, southwestern French town. François, Serge, and Henri are students at an all-boys boarding school. Madame Alvarez is their most fiercely committed teacher and Maïté, her daughter, hangs out with François when she isn’t studying out of the town’s local branch of the Communist party. Téchiné sets his film around the final months of France’s occupation in Algeria, and each characters’ response to that political and moral test—be it callous indifference or incensed argumentation—is as important as their other instinctual drives: to seduce, self-loathe, or silently watch love fade. A shorter version of Wild Reeds was originally conceived as part of the same TV-film cycle that produced Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water and Claire Denis’s U.S. Go Home.

In French with English subtitles

Restored DCP courtesy of Altered Innocence

“Defies all preconceptions … Wild Reeds treats its confused, searching characters with an almost surgical dispassion that turns out to be artful and moving.”

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“Using telephoto lenses to bring us close to the characters, Téchiné directs Wild Reeds with an impeccable sense of tempo … The actors seem to find exactly the right internal rhythm for each scene … Certainly one of the year’s best films.”

Dave Kehr, New York Daily News
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