Cannes 2022

Lionel Baier’s biting yet heartfelt Cannes film Continental Drift (South) tackles the migrant crisis and personal failures of empathy with wit and intelligence.

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“We bet Italian ice creams will put an end to all this upset and make the holidaymakers smile again,” a TV newscaster reports at the beginning of Lionel Baier’s wonderfully biting political satire Continental Drift (South). Disgustingly, the newscaster is referring to the vacationers’ intense need to ignore the fact that a ship of sixty-four migrants capsized, leading a young Black migrant boy to drown and wash up on the tourist beach that day — an increasingly common occurrence in the light dystopian EU of the film.

Nathalie (Isabelle Carré) — an EU officer in Catania, Italy, with signs around her apartment reminding people to “Save the planet. Turn off the lights.” — watches this broadcast with disgust. “Tu rêves,” she shouts back into the void, which roughly translates to, “You must be kidding”. She is horrified at people’s willingness to ignore the inconvenient atrocities happening around them. But it’s also hatred of herself for being a part of the xenophobic EU machine.

Continental Drift (South) is one of two movies at Cannes to take place in a light dystopia

Like Plan 75, Continental Drift (South) presents a world that’s only slightly more heightened than the one of early 2020. The film takes place just before the pandemic hit. Many internal European borders have closed. The admission of migrants to Europe from outside its borders has pretty much come to a halt. It’s even closer to what transpired after countries went into lockdowns and migrant drownings greatly increased. They have doubled in 2022 so far compared to 2020. As Nathalie points out, more stringent border control doesn’t actually stop people from coming; it just leads to more drownings. Like Plan 75, Lionel Baier also conceived of Continental Drift before the pandemic, but feels even more urgent in its wake.

An unofficial state visit

The plot revolves around an unofficial state visit of the French president and German Chancellor to a refugee housing facility. Nathalie is in charge of arranging this visit, which increasingly becomes virtue signalling theatre to bolster the politicians’ reputations. The bright colours of the clear blue sky and gorgeous landscapes contrast with the idyllic place’s dark xenophobic underbelly. 

The French President’s representative, Charlan (a hilarious Tom Villa) becomes frustrated when he discovers the facility is in good condition. Nobody is starving or without electricity or running water. How can they show that Macron has improved conditions if he can’t present a derelict “before” and wonderful “after” picture for the TV cameras? “It’s like teleshopping,” he explains, but for buying a political leader. The German representative, Ute (Usina Lardi), who is also Nathalie’s ex, is only slightly more reasonable.

All of this disgusts Nathalie, whose job is to facilitate press coverage of the humanitarian crisis. She understand that pervasive xenophobia has made the conditions terrible for the people she meets on a daily basis. She’s aware that the average person’s willingness to ignore the human suffering around them is what makes for such atrocities. At the refugee facility, she spots her estranged son, Albert (Théodore Pellerin), working on the ground. 

A mother-son reconciliation in Lionel Baier’s Continental Drift (South)

Nineteen-year-old Albert is an NGO worker who has made an app to track the myriad migrant drownings across Europe. Baier signals Albert’s fractured relationship with Nathalie immediately through their first encounter. Albert is speaking to a blogger in two-shot, when the sound of his mother’s voice outside the frame interrupts them. We only see Nathalie when Baier cuts to her in a solo wide shot. They never share the frame in this scene except when facing off.

The cold greeting is because Nathalie abandoned Albert when he was twelve, deciding she’d rather work for the EU abroad and see women than stay with her son and husband. She herself hasn’t figured out if she left because she came out or if it was just a convenient excuse. The film sweetly charts their thorny reconciliation as they both force each other to face up to their own hypocrisies. Albert is the only person who can forcefully hold Nathalie to account for her own hypocrisies, because he’s the proof of her biggest one. She built her career on caring about human capacity to allow atrocities to be committed by overlooking them. Yet she abandoned her child and abdicated her parental responsibilities.

Albert’s idealism and immaturity

Albert is, at once, idealistic, naive, immature, and oftentimes absolutely right. Early in the film he explains, “Neo-liberal laws have replaced racial laws. But it’s the same. If you don’t consume, you’re eliminated from the system by the system.” It’s an oversimplification, and he gets lambasted for it. But he’s ultimately not entirely wrong either when he describes the EU of the film world as “Nazis.” His naiveté makes him clear-sighted, but it also means he can act like a dick and a child. He stands his mother up for a drink. When she comes to fetch him, he embarrasses her with a freestyle rap in front of his friends, which details her personal failings.

Albert gets arrested for trashing his hostel, and Nathalie bails him out in order to force him to spend time with her to repair their relationship. When Nathalie attempts to enlist him to digitise a warehouse full of analog fingerprints of refugees, he is horrified. He tells her that she’s making him a “collaborator” in what he knows is bad news for those fingerprinted. She knows he’s right. But she’s been part of the bureaucracy for so long that she’s learned to live with enforcing it.

“There are principles we build our lives and our identities on”

“There are principles we build our lives and our identities on,” Albert tells Nathalie in disgust at her request. The central tension in the film Continental Drift (South) is the ways, both big and small, in which people live up to these principles altruistically or for an audience. And yet they can still be, at the same time, are absolute hypocrites.

As the youngest of the bunch, the critique of Albert is the funniest and gentlest. He has a penchant for stealing tic-tacs from oil companies — “revolutionary tax”. He reasons, it’s not a crime to steal from crooks. But we soon discover that he also pinched money from his synagogue’s community fund to finance his NGO. The community fund pays for the annual road trip to Auschwitz, which he regularly credits throughout the film as something that changed his life and his understanding of the human capacity — or perhaps, more accurately, the human bureaucratic capacity — for evil. 

Performing virtue

There’s some knotty territory here about the need to forgive people for being human while acknowledging that selective empathy can quickly turn into crimes against humanity. Nathalie and Albert are so used to playing to an audience that sometimes they themselves don’t know what motivates their good deeds: the cause itself or by proving to the world that they care about the cause.

All of the characters are so busy performing virtue they rarely take a look at themselves. Albert repeatedly puts up barriers against his mother, by ensuring there’s an audience for his teenage rebellion against her. Nathalie spends much of the film rehearsing a speech to give to Albert. She wants to apologise and take responsibility for disappearing from his life. But the early versions of the speech are overly defensive, until Ute points this out.

Fortunately, Baier spares us and her from the big dramatic moment of Nathalie giving her speech. Albert overhears her rehearsal at night, while pretending to be asleep. When she prepares to give it the next day, he stops her before she can start. He reminds her that their story isn’t over yet. She’s obsessed with the idea that she has cast herself in the role of a mother who abandoned her son, but as he humorously points out, “It’s not too late [to make amends]. You underestimate my role as an angry super-revengeful son.”

Pointing out hypocrisies

Most of Albert’s and Nathalie’s flaws aren’t going to hurt anyone on a large scale. But Baier constantly underlines how even those with the best intentions can ignore those in need when it’s convenient. There’s a great visual gag when Nathalie is en route to correcting an injustice. Along the way, she encounters a truck-full of spilled oranges onto the ground. Instead of helping the driver collect the oranges, she steps over them and his problem, without even looking down. At least she’s careful not to crush them.

Nathalie and Albert are so focused on other people’s indifference that they often miss when they misplace their own efforts . Nathalie rightly repeatedly points out that while her colleagues see refugees as a political image issue, they are real people to her. She regularly brings up the story with moral outrage as proof of people’s indifference. Albert points out that she doesn’t know the names of the people who drowned in the film’s opening. Even she doesn’t have the bandwidth to personally care about every atrocity. 

The history of places and the atrocities that happened

Throughout the film, Baier regularly gives us insight into the forgotten history of the places we’re visiting and how that’s part of the collective effort to overlook inconvenient tragedies. At one point, Nathalie gives an impromptu tour of Catania to a group of Asian tourists. She regularly makes reference to past atrocities in the streets that are no longer visible, and would not be commemorated on the tour bus’s usual path.

Midway through the film, there’s a visually stunning scene that serves as a great counterpoint to her tour. Albert and Nathalie visit the labyrinth on Gibelina, an art installation on top of a city that an earthquake destroyed in 1968. “The remains of the village are hidden beneath. The labyrinth exactly reproduces the streets of Gibelina,” Nathalie tells him. Out of this event where many people died is born this gorgeous site, part memorial, part something new. The scene hearkens back to why Albert was so moved by the Shoah Memorial at Auschwitz, a place that explicitly acknowledges the past atrocities that happened there. The stark lines of the concrete labyrinth recall many Holocaust memorials, although here, there’s something beautiful in place of just unimaginable grief. 

An incredible sequence at Gibelina

Gibelina is a kind of other-worldly site, and it’s also the first time that Nathalie and Albert really connect. Here, there is no audience. It’s just the two of them, and very tall walls of a labyrinth that nobody can peer over. They spar about politics and Jewish stories in the car on the way over — the rare two-shots of the pair. They separate around the labyrinth at first. But they also finally start to share more and more frames together as they leave the labyrinth and talk about the elephant in the room —  his anger, and her abandonment — but with humour to lighten the pathos.

The long journey back to the migrant camp from here is both inward and outward. It’s also maybe one of the more forced parts of the film’s screenplay. Nevertheless, the solution the pair find to doing something good in a corrupt system leads to a gorgeous, joyous scene, and one of the most satisfying cinematic hugs.

Isabelle Carré and Théodore Pellerin carry Continental Drift (South) with strong performances

Though the script and direction of Continental Drift (South) are both witty and smart, it’s a film that lives and dies with the performances of the lead actors, who have to switch between combative banter and vulnerability at a moment’s notice. Carré is luminous as a woman who has fucked up and is trying to do better, but also won’t take shit from her son. She carries the film. Isabelle is the only character who doesn’t appear to be excessively performing virtue, which means her hypocrisies are subtler.

Isabelle’s idealism has been hardened by reality. She has made mistakes and is trying to own up to them. Carré creates a woman who can believably spar with her son one minute, become emotionally naked the next, and abandon him yet again without blinking — and one you don’t hate for any of it. She’s hurting, too, and trying.

Théodore Pellerin gives his best performance since Genèse in Continental Drift (South)

Pellerin is doing something equally challenging: antics are what generates the tension in their relationship: we have to ultimately love him, and see the boy who needs his mother, the idealistic justice crusader, and the teenage dipshit. Pellerin has long been one of the most exciting young actors working today; his breakout role in Philippe Lesage’s Genèse is actually what landed him the role in Continental Drift. He gave two of the best performances of 2020. And yet Continental Drift feels like the first time he’s gotten to really stretch as an actor since Genèse. As Albert, Pellerin speaks German-accented English, talks (with a straight face) about wearing sandals because he doesn’t want his feet trapped, freestyle raps, and regularly takes off his shirt in a foolish attempt to attract women. 

Théodore Pellerin’s performance

Pellerin is equally adept at throwing out great one-liners as he is with more slapstick comedy, using his “weird face and long body” to their full potential. Albert at first attacks his mother by invading her personal space. Later, Pellerin strips down Albert’s cocky, self-righteous persona to a soft-spoken boy who needs his mother. It’s tricky territory to navigate. He has to play a boy who is awful to his mom but whom we have to love because he secretly just wants his mom. Albert gets so caught up in the cause that he not only makes huge ethical missteps, but can’t always distinguish his own altruism from wanting to to get laid or praised.

Whereas the characterisation of Nathalie’s EU colleagues shows the cynicism within the establishment, Albert has to make mistakes that we can empathise with and forgive. It’s a tremendous comedic performance with a lot of heart, that is constantly walking a fine line of someone whom we can like because he means well but behaves badly.

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