Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh re-envision the demolition of the housing project Cité Gagarine — an aspirational symbol of French communism — with a heavy dose of magical realism.
In August of 2019, Cité Gagarine — a once-aspirational housing project located in the eastern suburbs of Paris, one of the last strongholds of the French Communist Party — was demolished as a crowd of its former residents watched from a distance. In “Gagarine,” by the filmmakers Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, this real-life moment is re-envisioned with a heavy dose of magical realism, foregrounding the dreams of a new generation that build upon the structure’s utopian roots.
An extension of the directing duo’s 2015 short, the movie was shot in and around Cité Gagarine during much of the same time that construction workers began clearing it out. As a result, “Gagarine” is part coming-of-age story, part historical document. In this latter guise, the film is a curious artifact, weaving archival footage of the community’s heyday into a fictional account of its recent demise.
It follows Youri (Alséni Bathily), a soft-spoken Black teenager with a fierce passion for all things astronomical — his namesake, like the building’s, is the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Rattled by the sudden departure of his family and neighbors, Youri holes up in the building’s basement, an increasingly surreal abode complete with a vegetable garden and a makeshift planetarium — kind of like a spaceship.
A humdrum drama unfolds as Youri agonizes over the loss of his community, deals with an unruly pal who’s turned to drug-dealing, and falls for a resourceful young woman (Lyna Khoudri) who belongs to a Roma family similarly facing housing-related injustices.
Though Liatard and Trouilh center the experiences of underprivileged, immigrant groups in France, creating a sense of continuity between the past and present, the slight narrative is mostly shrug-inducing and sleepy. “Gagarine” is more interesting conceptually than it is in execution, but at least the filmmakers know to exalt the setting’s spectral qualities, adding dreamy, hypnotic touches to their phantom portrait of a place that is no longer of this world.
Gagarine
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
