Thirty years of triangulating film and cultural insight
Learning from movies seems improbable in this year of internal and external political rifts, but after André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux sauvages) premiered at the New York Festival 30 years ago, its vision of political and humanist harmony remains great enough to instruct this era’s discordance.
Set in a small town in the south of France in 1962, Wild Reeds deals with sex, social tradition, culture, and politics as fundamental coming-of-age conditions. The Algerian war is ending, and Téchiné shows its repercussions on four youths, François (Gaël Morel), Maïté (Élodie Bouchez), Serge (Stéphane Rideau), and Henri (Frédéric Gorny), awaiting high school graduation. Their sexual awakening accompanies a political awakening — a beginning that Téchiné equates to the Évian Accords that established Algerian independence and still dominate European consciousness.
This semi-autobiographical story reveals Téchiné’s moral conscience by dramatizing each youth’s romantic and intellectual effort to understand their social place and personal desires. The Algerian war backgrounds this struggle, as do the local customs, education, and the movies and music they experience.
Those events become a significant part of François realizing his personal nature. He accepts his homosexuality as an individual identity no different from the singularity of the adults around him (introduced at the wedding for a soldier en route to Algiers) and his peers — his female best friend Maïté, who shares his worldly interest, the feral country boy Serge, and the intense immigrant boy Henri; they both arouse his curiosity. This thorough conception of life’s circumstances views the world in a wholesome, healing way that is no less complex than the chaotic millennial discord we currently face.
Téchiné’s resolve comes from the distinctive understanding brought by his era’s sensitive cultural lessons: François and Maïté argue the significance of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, then later run off to watch Jacques Demy’s Lola. These films triangulate the personal and political issues that become touchstones for Téchiné’s own movie.
Each classmate in Wild Reeds is affected by the war through family connections — Maïté’s mother is a schoolteacher and communist who sides with the Algerian struggle, Serge’s brother is a conscripted soldier looking to escape the military, and Henri’s parents are former Algerian colonists whose separation and repatriation troubles his sense of identity.
How these youths approach their self-realization evokes the film’s title — a metaphor from La Fontaine’s poetic fable The Oak and the Reed about learning resilience, to bend not break in response to social differences.
That spiritual and political wisdom is lost in today’s fractiousness, but Téchiné gets depth and beauty from François and those around him working toward that wisdom. It is achieved through politics and faith. La Fontaine’s “Nature seems to me quite unjust to you” translates to the modern designation “at risk” which, in Téchiné’s view, applies to the political, physical, and metaphysical faced by François and company, unpredictable wild reeds, each confronting the oak of social convention.
Demy’s Lola was the start of his amazing triptych of films about desire and faith (including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Model Shop). An exquisite faithfulness in Lola teaches about the existence of love as part of human endeavor, despite the intervention of politics and war that figure strongly in Lola, Umbrellas, and Model Shop. The sectarian premise of Wild Reeds is transcended by what François and Maïté implicitly learn from Through a Glass Darkly’s final scene. Bergman’s young protagonist speculates about love, and his father answers:
The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime / Longing and denial. Trust and distrust.
Téchiné’s Wild Reeds similarly wonders:
I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or love is God himself.
Then receives and channels Bergman’s answer:
Love and God are the same? That thought heals me in my emptiness and my dirty despair.
Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It’s like a reprieve from a death sentence.
It is the lesson of art to teach this awareness. François and Maïté get it from the movies, and Téchiné passes it forward to us. That’s why Wild Reeds might be the most significant cinematic anniversary of 2025.