Reinventing Marvin

Marvin grows up in a small village. His father drinks, his mother is worn out and his brothers mock him. He is beaten at school. For being what he is, for how he speaks, for how he walks. A teacher opens a drama club and puts him on stage. Marvin goes to the city. He changes his name. He gets into the conservatory, makes a circle, and writes a play that carries his own life onto the stage. In it he plays his mother and his father. Then he has to decide whether to invite his family to the performance. Anne Fontaine directs. Finnegan Oldfield plays Marvin as an adult and Jules Porier as a child; Catherine Mouchet and Isabelle Huppert are in the cast. It is a French production. The source is Édouard Louis's novel drawn from his own life; the film adapts it freely. Isabelle Huppert plays herself and is drawn into Marvin's play. The narrative runs on two planes of time; the childhood in the village and the present in Paris are interleaved. The matter it treats is class and identity; the film does not separate them, and the beatings and the mockery come from the same place. The narrative does not show the family as one dimensional; the section with the mother changes the stance at the end. The film deliberately leaves the line between stage and life uncertain. The ending gives no reconciliation. Its limit is structure; the leaps in time break the narrative and the pace is uneven. Who it is for: viewers who like French drama and adaptations of autobiography. Who it is not for: it is heavy, in pieces, and the ending bitter.