Just a decade after graduating in film, French twins Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma are poised to make a global splash when their fourth feature, “And Their Children After Them,” premieres in competition at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.
Adapted from a literary sensation that won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, the film explores teenage sadness and working-class depression with a novelistic twist, playing like an energetic coming-of-age ballad filled with operatic sentiments and chart-topping tunes.
“We wanted to transform a narrative made up of small, extraordinary conflicts into something grand and cinematic,” says director Zoran Boukherma, who co-wrote the book with his brother Ludovic after actor and filmmaker Gilles Lellouche handed them each a copy of the book over lunch two years ago.
“This concept came from our dialogue with Gilles and (original author) Nicolas Mathieu, who recognized that a very small event can result in the ruin of an entire family. The book explores the tragedy of extraordinary individuals and the romance of everyday life, and we wanted to do the same (on a cinematic scale),” says Ludovic Boukherma.
Lellouche, who stars in “And Their Children After Them,” initially approached the Boukherma brothers to write a sequel based on the book, but eventually allowed them to take over the project and turn it into a film after he decided to work on his own film “Beating Hearts,” which competed at Cannes this year.
To solve their biggest challenge to date, the directing duo worked with successful French producers Hugo Selignac of Chi-Fou-Mi (a Mediawan imprint) and Alain Attal and Les Movies du Tresor, who also produced Lellouche’s epic love story “Beating Hearts.”
Told over four summers, the story follows Anthony (Paul Kircher, breakout star of “The Animal Kingdom”) as he matures from a gangly dreamer in the dog days of 1992 to a confident young man on the eve of France’s 1998 World Cup victory.
Unsurprisingly, his path is fraught with desire and conflict, from a largely unrequited romantic obsession with the very wealthy Steph (Angelina Woreth, from last year’s Directors’ Fortnight winner “This Life of Mine”) to a rivalry with Moroccan Hacine (“Oussekine” star Sayyid El Alami) that grows more violent over time.
Without sugarcoating the story’s stark social backdrop — often tracking the ways financial precarity can bleed into substance abuse or outright xenophobia in an area that remains a hotbed for the far right — the filmmakers strayed from the social realist strategy common to politically minded theater productions.
“The book is about all of France,” says director Ludovic Boukherma. “So the film wanted to be equally accessible. We wanted to move away from naturalism and not go for that raw, handheld style. Instead, we went for something a little more generous, something closer to New Hollywood — offering the film to those we portray, making it more common.” In doing so, Zoran Boukherma says they felt they were making the film more accessible and more generous so that everyone, including the people they portray in the film, could enjoy it.
The 30-something directors burst onto the scene with a pair of horror-comedies that evoked video-store perennials like “An American Werewolf in London” and “Jaws” from within a more rural French setting.
“The book spoke to us so much,” says Zoran, who grew up in a small rural town in southwestern France. “It resonated with our personal adolescence that ultimately we thought that by adapting Nicolas Mathieu’s text we could make our film more personal. The summer boredom, the working-class environment, the love for[an elusive woman]— all of these could have come from our lives.”
Kircher, a rising star who has earned Cesar nominations for his performances in Thomas Cailley’s “Animal Kingdom” and Christophe Honoré’s “Winter Boy,” also brought vulnerability to the character of Anthony, who is portrayed as a “little brawler” in the book, the directors say. Kircher, who worked with a choreographer to portray Anthony from ages 14 to 20, exudes “something a little unstable” that makes his character “a little touching,” Ludovic says.
The filmmakers took their greatest liberties with Anthony’s father, Patrick (played by Lellouche), who struggles with alcoholism. While the book portrayed the father as more of a racist and a brute, Lellouche — no doubt exhausted after arriving on set just hours after finishing “Beating Hearts” — played the character’s world-weariness as a stand-in.
“We think he can be violent, but mostly towards himself,” Zoran explains. “He’s a softer character. His alcoholism tells us he’s a damaged person, not someone who hurts others. Possibly, unconsciously, we put a bit of our parents in these characters too.”
Starring as Steph, Anthony’s former flame, Woreth was “exactly the Steph[he and Ludovic]imagined when[they]read the book, simply.” “When we pitted her against Paul and had them play together, there was something about their relationship that clicked immediately,” Zoran says, adding that she was “more confident” while Anthony was more “awkward.”
The classic rock soundtrack also underscores the story’s common hook. While the needle drops of Aerosmith, Pink Scorching Chili Peppers and none other than Bruce Springsteen might cost a bit more, the filmmakers say they had “carte blanche” in putting together the most applicable soundtrack for the halftime show.
That is, with one notable exception.
“We didn’t get ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” Ludovic says. “Nirvana doesn’t promote their rights, so it’s really unimaginable to get a song. I think the last Batman got one, but they paid $5 million!”
The filmmakers, however, made the most of their mixtape, choreographing entire sequences to classic rock performed live on set and forcing the actors to perform in sync, such as during a pool scene with the Pink Chili Peppers’ “Below the Bridge” playing in the background.
“Doing that created an emotion that just wouldn’t have existed without the music,” Zoran says. “It created something real.”