A hypnotic coming-of-ager from Robin Campillo, drawing on his own childhood growing up in one of France’s last colonial outposts (Madagascar) for Red Island (L’île rouge), a story about a little boy who watches and learns as the French expat community do their thing.
It is beautifully observed and gorgeously put together but it’s the sort of subject matter which, in the wrong hands, would be all sorts of boring. Campillo, though, is a great film-maker and with open nods masters like Abel Gance and Eisenstein, he assembles his film poetically. It is an intoxicating experience.
And yet, superficially, it is done as if this were cold, clean and factual storytelling. Life on a base where expats live a pampered life in the sun, of drinks and meals and social interactions, gossip and petty rivalries. The pool. The church on Sunday. Social get-togethers. Family meals outdoors on balmy evenings.
A shadowy, barely explored, subplot tells a different story – of military manoeuvres to suppress uprisings in remote parts of the island.
Shadowy because everything is seen through the eyes of Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), eight years old and a big fan of female comic-book superhero Fantômette, and too young to realise what the French are really doing there.
Life at the soft end of the colonial experience is given shape by the different attitudes of three women. Thomas’s mother, Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a gypsy spirit happy to live the life of the itinerant army wife. Odile (Luna Carpiaux), who misses the comforts of civilisation and is determined not to have any kids until she and the family are safely back in France. And Madame Guedj (Sophie Guillemin), the blowsy older woman who has seen it all before and whose gossip acts as a kind of social lubricant.
The unspoken bond is the one between most expats from wealthy countries – their lives here are much better than they would be back home. There they’d be just cogs in the machine; here they are colonial overlords. Racism is such a fact of everyday life that it is not even discussed. Robert’s little friend, a fellow fan of Fantômette, is a brown girl, Suzanne (Cathy Pham), and that’s OK because Robert is a kid. But when one of the menfolk decide to swap his white partner for a brown woman from the village, it’s so serious a development that the padre is soon planning an exorcism. The guy is either under some voodoo spell or he’s been tricked, there can be no other explanation.
To spell this film out in plot terms, though, is to shortchange it. On the one hand there is the story and on the other there is the effect, which is relentlessly spooky, weird, off. In Campillo’s telling everything about the lives of these expats seems fake or fantastical. When Thomas has his little imaginative fantasies about Fantômette fighting crime – done by Campillo in comic-book style – they seem of a piece with the lives of his parents, which don’t seem quite anchored to reality.
If Campillo is unknown to you, he’s worth exploring. At this point probably best known for his film 120 BPM, about the Aids advocacy group ACT UP, his powerful and evocative earlier film Eastern Boys, about rent boys on the periphery of Paris, is a glimpse of a life most of us know nothing about and well worth seeking out.
By the end of Red Island, eyes have been opened. Robert has learned about the world he’s currently living in and something about himself. His mother, too, has discovered something – that her husband Robert is not quite French enough for her coterie of closet racists. France, too, has learned something about its fading place in the world – the colonial era is over. There is political weight beneath this sad and rather beautiful film.
Red Island – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
