Young French Cinema 2022: Magnetic Beats w/The World Within
Director: Vincent Maël Cardona Run Time: 120 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2021
Starring: Benjamin Georjon, Frédéric Vonhof, Joseph Olivennes, Marie Colomb, Thimotée Robart
Country: France
Language: French
Les Magnétiques/Magnetic Beats is presented at the Film Center and in our Virtual Screening Room as part of Young French Cinema.
Presentations at the Film Center include New French Shorts program selection Le Monde en Soi/The World Within from Jean-Charles Finck and Sandrine Stoïanov.
Premiered at Cannes Film Festival 2021. 1981, the dawn of a new era in France: the Socialist candidate François Mitterrand has just been elected president. But while his tiny hometown in Brittany erupts with joy, twenty-year-old Philippe has other things on his mind. He’s obsessed with sound, manipulating tape recordings to make weird effects on his older brother Jérôme’s radio show. And next week he’ll be assessed for compulsory military service. If the army takes him, he might never see Marianne again. Marianne is his brother’s girlfriend, and he’s totally in love with her. It’s hopeless, of course. Or is it? When Philippe leaves to serve with the French forces in Berlin, it’s with a mix tape from Marianne in his pocket.
“A vividly drawn love letter”
—Wendy Ide for Screen Daily
With this feature debut, director Vincent Maël Cardona crafts an evocative time capsule of an era close to us in years but in many ways now remote, when Europe was divided by an iron curtain and a sequence of songs on magnetic tape could serve as a declaration of love. Deploying a stellar soundtrack of European post-punk classics, Cardona juxtaposes the eternal thrills of first love and the frustrations of provincial life with a lovingly specific depiction of a bygone period, lending tremendous emotional immediacy to the lives of those who came of age at the dawn of the 1980s.
Young French Cinema 2022 Program See our upcoming films