Kind Hearts

(Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes, Belgium, 2022)

Kind Hearts is available for worldwide viewing on the Avila website.

Common Love

The opening scene of Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes’ Kind Hearts is stunning. In a fairground at night, the central teenage figures, Billie Meeussen and Lucas Roefmans, ride on a thrilling attraction high in the air. So do other customers: adults, children, friends. But the manner in which this is cinematically conveyed to us has none of the blurry, on-the-fly, fragmented quality we might usually expect from a documentary shot in such an environment. The camera (also way up there in the air) keeps a perfectly static frame, even as the cityscape zips by in the background; the recorded sound of voices is almost unnervingly crisp and clear; the découpage passes placidly from one duo of riders to the next. What an immediately intriguing meld of spontaneity and planning, documentary and fiction, this is.

Above all, there is the fact of the setting, the situation, and all the associations it brings along. A fairground like this – they seem to look exactly like this one all over the world, unless we plunge down to the tawdry noir settings of a Nightmare Alley (1947 or 2021) – is a special, iconographic feature of the teen movie genre. We have seen it in Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009, where it constitutes the setting for the majority of the plot), in the teen thriller Fear (James Foley, 1996), in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (Sam Firstenberg, 1984), even in Pedro Costa’s debut feature, Blood (O sangue, 1989): the array of rides, the blaring pop music, the flashing lights. And above all, the perpetual cycle of teenage couples either hooking up or breaking apart amidst the gaudy flux of this sound and fury.

In teen cinema, the fairground is an ambiguous place. As a space of fun, seemingly death-defying thrills and furtive erotic licence, it can remind us of the Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and his famous theory of carnival or, more broadly, the carnivalesque: that precious get-away or hide-away that allows freedom from all social rules, and the inversion of all dominant values. Yet, for both Bakhtin and the creators of teen movies, this freedom is usually only temporary: those who enjoy its liberties must soon return to their everyday life of home, school, work. “The Carnival is Over”, as a 1965 hit by the Australian group The Seekers (actually based on a 1883 Russian folk song!), mournfully intones: intense ecstasy, removed from society and its mundane obligations, cannot last forever.

A concern very similar to this is troubling the minds of Billie and Lucas, and we hear them speak about it at length. When we are introduced to the pair, the first, exciting period of their romance has already passed. They are facing the momentous life-changes that are typical of youth: moving to a bigger city (in this case, Brussels), choosing a particular field of university studies. In this respect, Kind Hearts knowingly stumbles upon, in factual reality, one of the greatest chronotopes (another term from Bakhtin) of teen fiction: the last summer, the final, available time for naïve, irresponsible fun, such as we see it in films including John Milius’ classic Big Wednesday (1978). (There’s even one literally titled Last Summer, made by Frank Perry in 1969, but it is an especially bleak and cruel variant on the generic formula.)

Inside this whirlwind of imminent change, Billie and Lucas have a big issue to face: should they stay together as a couple? Move in with each other? Not long into the film, Billie dares to express her musing doubt: should they break up? There begins a somewhat agonising back-and-forth, where each member of the trouble tries to intuit what the other is really thinking and feeling. We also sense, in the film’s general alternation of scenes involving one person and then the other, a subtle vein of intrigue: the filmmakers, spending special, privileged time with each of them, is able to surprise the other with a new ‘move’ that has been silently and slowly brewing.

In this respect, Kind Hearts is closer to a more cerebral type of teen movie, rather than the American model: Éric Rohmer’s wispy tales of youth by the seaside, for instance, such as A Summer’s Tale (1996). On the level of the organisation of narrative and point-of-view (as Pascal Bonitzer’s 1991 book on Rohmer perceptively argues), Rohmer’s comedies of manners are founded on secrecy, solitude, conflicting and never entirely resolvable perspectives on apparently shared experiences. On the level of content, Rohmer’s French kids are carefree and sensual, but also troubled by a sometimes crippling self-consciousness: they philosophise and theorise about everything they do and say, as if seeing themselves from the outside, as characters on a stage within a scenario sketched by Pierre de Marivaux.

Billie and Lucas offer a version of this. They are hyper-aware that love can be considered an unreal illusion created by pop songs and movies, by society’s myths and expectations. But, at the same time, they are afraid of holding on too tightly to the memory of their initial love, thereby staying together and accepting the inevitable drift into repetition, banality, the comfort of familiarity. The prospect of the everyday scares them. Meanwhile, they are extremely aware of the privilege afforded them by their youth: they crave novelty, perpetual freshness, new experiences and encounters. That is their right as smart, sensitive, sexy teenagers: no longer can it be said, as Oscar Wilde once opined, that “youth is wasted on the young” because they have no consciousness of the specialness of their ephemeral condition.

Nonetheless, what we see in most of Kind Hearts cannot be easily squared with the life-changing, rollicking adventures we see in many American teen movies (including, in the documentary sphere, the remarkable Seventeen [1983] by Joel DeMott & Jeff Kreines) devoted to the liminal passage in time and space between childhood and adulthood. No petty thievery, daredevil joy rides, drug intoxication or wild sex. None of that Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) or Euphoria (TV series, 2019, ongoing) stuff! More often apart than together, Billie and Lucas spend their days and nights pursuing resolutely ordinary tasks: studying, chatting on Skype, hanging out with friends, meeting in parks. The fairground of the opening scene is only a memory; the carnival is over. Moreover, the hand of recent history weighs down on this chronicle in a sudden, offhand but irrevocable way: in early 2020, the Coronavirus and lockdown end the party for just about everybody at once, everywhere.

There is a touch – but only a touch – of glamour in Lucas’ musical sessions with singer-songwriter Charlotte Meyntjens (who boasts of being able to separate sex from love, much to the dismay of her more sentimental male pals), and a hint of potential romantic-erotic intrigue between them; however, this is not the direction in which things go. Even Charlotte’s lyrics, drawn shamelessly from her personal life, are keyed to the mundane: one of their songs is titled “Common Love”.

In this sense, the film keys into a counter-tradition of the teen genre: a celebration of the everyday. You see it best in the opening scenes (even under the opening credits) of many teen movies: the camera lovingly pans across everything that is ordinary in an average bedroom, the posters on the walls, the alarm clock next to the bed, the slippers on the floor … In Kind Hearts, this sense of everydayness is felt in the steady flow of the changing seasons, the generally undramatic tone of events (even if, as the directors attest, they sometimes started work on a scene or situation by giving lines from a previous film to Billie and Lucas), the palpably Bressonian pulling-back from the brink of melodrama, the discreet lack of any visible or overt sexuality.

As a result, there is a special tension that Kind Hearts captures well: between Billie and Lucas – between any two people – what is to be, love or friendship? We might feel that settling on friendship after the experience of intimate love is a compromise: what John Cassavetes once witheringly described as relationships that “degenerate into affection and respect”, but lack that all-important vital spark. Or we might conclude that a friendship won after such a break-up is a genuine – even radical – achievement, something to be trusted, nurtured and cherished, more genuine and lasting than ephemeral passion. Is it this latter attitude that the Ozu-like title Kind Hearts itself points us toward?

In English, the popular term coming of age is strange, no matter how you take it. On a literal level, we have all already arrived at (‘come of’) whatever age we are, young or old – that’s a banal fact, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But of course, the expression comes loaded with a very particular meaning of maturity. It’s a teleological notion: we are each meant to ‘grow into’ the person we are meant to be, the fulfilment of our adult selves. Or, at the very least, we pass a significant developmental threshold – a rite of passage as it is often called, with a nod to anthropology. But who ever truly grows up in this clear, neatly resolved way? Kind Hearts lands, through its own indelible means, on a different plateau of everyday wisdom that is characteristic of teen movies: we muddle along, neither right nor wrong, neither angel nor demon, neither child nor adult. For once, the cliché bears a touching truth: life goes on for Billie and Lucas, together and apart.

Auto-Biblio Note: I have been writing about teen movies for (so far) over three decades. A summary of this work can be found in the “Live to Tell” chapter of my essay collection Mysteries of Cinema (2018/2020). Copious traces of an unfinished book on this genre can be found here, and especially in the bonus 74-page PDF Crazy Summers that is exclusively accessible through supporting my Patreon campaign.

© Adrian Martin March 2022