The titular island of Robin Campillo’s autobiographically inspired new film Red Island is Madagascar, where the writer-director spent his early childhood. This feature from the director of Eastern Boys and 120 BPM is set on the former French colony in the early 1970s, a decade after the island achieved independence. It follows a young boy, Thomas (newcomer Charlie Vauselle), who lives with his family on a French Air Force base. There he observes the secrets of adult life and the effects of colonialism, as experienced by the island’s population – notably by a young woman called Miangaly (Amely Rakotarimalala). But, alongside Red Island’s realistic evocation of life on the base, Campillo creates stylised, dream-like interludes inspired by Thomas’s favourite reading – the adventures of a young female sleuth named Fantômette.
Here, Jonathan Romney talks to the director about how his childhood inspired the story, the ideas of revolution and uprising that are bubbling under the surface, and the fantasy sequences that pervade the film.
JONATHAN ROMNEY: How did the story emerge from your own life, and how much did your family situation resemble Thomas’s?
ROBIN CAMPILLO: Those are memories I’d mulled over for ages. I started to put together everything I had in my head, and tried to construct a kind of architecture – like building a sort of temple from fragments of memory. My father was a non-commissioned officer in the Air Force. He had been posted in Algeria and then our family returned to France for two years, and it was a nightmare. We realised that we were poor, my father was depressed, we didn’t fit in. So when we left for Madagascar, we knew we were going back to our dream – being French but living in a paradise. We spent two years there, in the final moments of the colonial dream – and we knew that when we left, it would mean a definitive return to reality.
Red Island (2024)
JR: The title has the ring of an adventure story.
RC: For me, ‘Red Island’ suggested an Arcadia, a land of dreams and abundance. It also suggests mystery, dream – red because the earth there is red, but also the red of revolution. The 1972 revolution there was Marxist, and very influenced by 1968 in France.
JR: There’s a revolution in the structure of the film - when everything changes and Miangaly becomes the centre of the action. You end by evoking Madagascar’s dream of a better future, although things didn’t end up quite as hoped.
RC: The Soviet Union and North Korea took control of that revolution, they’d been waiting in the wings. But as Gilles Deleuze says, ‘You can say that revolutions fail, but what doesn’t fail is the becoming-revolutionary of the people who make the revolution.’ It doesn’t really matter what comes afterwards, what people experienced at that moment of liberation can’t be taken away from them.
Red Island (2024)
JR: On the French base, it’s all about norms and control – norms of behaviour, norms of sexual behaviour. What’s particularly shocking is when the Church intervenes to forbid love between a French man and a Malagasy woman.
RC: We see in the film that there was prostitution, that women were sleeping with soldiers - who often didn’t pay them – and that’s not considered a problem for public order. But as soon as a young Frenchman falls in love with a Malagasy woman, they say she used ‘black magic’. In general, the French are fairly rational – but in Madagascar, exorcisms were held. It’s all about regulating the order of things in the small world of the base, where nothing is allowed to go wrong.
JR: The Fantômette books were extremely popular in France in the early 60s. She’s a junior sleuth - a kind of masked counterpart to Nancy Drew, or the Famous Five.
RC: Le Club des Cinq! But the Famous Five have parents who make their supper, everything’s very normal. Fantômette is completely self-sufficient, she has a cat and two best friends, but no parents, they never appear. Even as a child, I always sensed there was something queer at work – that whole business of living secretly by night. For me, Fantômette was always about ambiguity – she watches adults by day, she unmasks their real faces by night. The question of what people really do at night always fascinated me.
Red Island (2024)
JR: The Fantômette episodes, with characters wearing stylized masks, completely disrupt the realism of the film. It’s very close to certain films by Alain Resnais, like La Vie est un Roman.
RC: Yes, or Mon Oncle d’Amérique. Resnais is the French director who inspired me the most. I originally wanted to shoot the Fantômette sequences in real settings: we looked for locations around France, but that France doesn’t exist anymore and I don’t think it ever did. The idea was that for Thomas, France would be something exotic, because he doesn’t really know the country; the France he imagines is a lot more exotic for him than Madagascar. I realised that the adults in those scenes needed to wear masks, to suggest that the adults in Thomas’s life are really masked too, that they’re simply performing happiness.
Red Island is out in cinemas and on curzon home cinema from 1 March
