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Andre Techine's Wild Reeds may look like a French classic in the Renoir-Truffaut tradition of sensual awakening and lyrical interrelationships, but it actually comes out of the melodrama genre Techine has inventively practiced for twenty years. That's why its four adolescent characters' emotional struggles are so clearly portrayed. Through melodrama, with its structural affinities for exploring domestic relationships and social propriety, Techine has learned to unravel tangled feelings and inchoate acts of self-realization with his distinctive fantasist beauty and humanist precision.
Unlike Fassbinder's didactic, revisionist reconstructions of melodrama with gargoyle/mannequin archetypes, Techine's relationship to the genre keeps faith with its wondrous romanticism. For Techine, melodrama allows spontaneous behavior and the unpredictability of nature (partly a French cultural reflex). His brand of melodrama also benefits from a structuralist approach to narrative form and its residual psychological acuity, breaking it into components of drama and music that explore family and group dynamics both in the contemporary world and in cinema history. His analytical interest in a form usually devoted to the primacy of emotion over intellect answers a particular need in sexual ideology: to reconcile sex and social roles, to understand identity as a product of cultural conditioning.
Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux sauvages, '94) boldly yet casually considers the crossed signals of sexual and political orientation in the relationships of four teens in a provincial French town in the early Sixties. Rather than exercising nostalgia, the film gives the past the vivacity of contemporary experience. Techine's artful spontaneity about the youthful discovery of passion, choice, love, and morality revises the very substance and feel of melodrama into a fresher, more open-ended, exploratory dramatic form. Wild Reeds essays the feeling of openness and wonder--a hindsight approach, but without condescension. This is adolescence distilled to its most palpable emotions: Francois (Gael Morel) risks losing his friendship with Maite (Elodie Bouchez) when he realizes his affection for her differs from his attraction to his schoolmate Serge (Stephane Rideau). Francois is further perplexed by his infatuation with Henri (Frederic Gorny). The presence of different levels and kinds of affection creates an unpredictable flow of emotion and a host of possible choices that confound each character. Techine complicates this by presenting the typical romantic triangle as also a diagram of political and...