greenwoodside

 Caught Red Island (2023), a film heavily influenced by writer/director Robin Campillo's own biography, and I'm so glad I did. 

For most of the running time, we follow Thomas, an eight-year-old boy in nerdy queer love with girl superhero Fantômette. Apart from reading and chatting with his friend Suzanne in their den, he -- helpfully for the film -- likes spying on the adults around him. The adults in this case live on a French military base on Madagascar in the sixties, following independence but under an administration that still privileged the role of France and the French in society. 

Many of the beats may sound somewhat familiar: there's an overbearing macho father who's never achieved high enough rank to enter the officers' mess; a beautiful, discontented mother, a young French soldier in love with/bewitched by (the latter according to the colonial hold-outs) a Malagasy woman -- Miangaly -- alcohol-fuelled parties and a hot, beautiful landscape of always-summer. 

But it's so well filmed, the familiar elements all felt fresh. It also avoids any overt horror and largely avoids overt cruelty: remarkably, the three pet crocodiles all survive, and I'd had them marked down as metaphorical sacrifices to the gods of metaphor as soon as they appeared. But the jockeying for status and threads of violence winding through base life still come through very clearly, without them being outlined in blood-red ink. And the neat change in the final fifteen minutes from following the French to following the Malagasy is done with panache. 

Miangaly, walking home in the dark, spots little Thomas spying on her from the trees while wearing the Fantômette costume of a cape and black stockings that his mother made. "Buzz off home!" she tells him, and he does, before she carries on out of the base, and into the celebrations marking the release of prisoners locked up for protesting against the pro-French government of President Tsiranana. A few minutes earlier, we'd seen her remark with a laugh, after her French soldier boyfriend passed out in her lap: "Don't you breath easier when the white men are asleep?" Having previously been a cipher on her limited appearances, it was as if she grinned and cheerfully took the mask off. 

Didn't get yet another job. I'm not sure how many job interviews I've done this year. Next time, I think I may just avoid making any reference to my current occupation and focus entirely on examples from before I started here. The frustration creeps in when I talk about Employer X, however much I want to hide it. A 'Storm the bastille!!  Ca ira!!"" undertone creeps in. Interviewers probably think I'm going to either guillotine them or cry over my laptop if they give me a job. 

Am also thinking of small projects to do at the weekend to a) hook another employer and b) raise my rather tender self-esteem. 

I flunked various questions this time, but my blank uncomprehending stare when one of the interviewers asked about work-life balance may have been my most triumphant failure. I'm not even a workaholic; I've just had to lean into whatever workaholic traits I have over the last year or so because it's made rational sense to do so.