‘The Kingdom’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Julien Colonna. France. 2024. 109 minutes.

Corsica, 1995. Fifteen-year-old Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) steals a kiss with a boy at a celebration and arranges to fulfill him on the seaside within the afternoon. It’s regular teenage stuff. However Lesia is not any regular teenager. She’s the daughter of the infamous kingpin of a Corsican crime household. Earlier than she makes it to the seaside, she is pushed to an remoted home the place her father, Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), is holed up along with his troops. A struggle between rival gangs is brewing. And Lesia, reluctant to go away the daddy she loves however hardly ever sees, finds herself on the frontline. The muscular function debut by Corsican-born Julien Colonna covers acquainted territory however advantages from a recent little one’s-eye perspective and a magnetic efficiency from non-professional actor Benedetti.

There’s a bruising authenticity to the image

It’s stunning, maybe, that there haven’t been extra movies immersed in the dead of night world of the Corsican mafia – the island has one of many highest homicide charges in Europe in any case, so there’s no scarcity of dramatic materials to mine. However The Kingdom joins Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Olivier Panchot’s De Guerre Lasse as one among comparatively few photos to enterprise into Cosica’s prison underworld.

Born and raised on the island, Colonna (whose earlier work consists of the award-winning quick Confession and the mini-series Brutal: Style Of Violence) clearly is aware of his topic – there’s a bruising authenticity to the image that comes, in no small half, from a prolonged and meticulous casting course of. The largely non-professional ensemble is stuffed with intimidating, bullet-headed males who appear to be they know their method round a shotgun. Canal+ and Netflix co-financed the movie and have French broadcasting rights for first and second home windows respectively. Elsewhere, the image ought to be of curiosity to competition programmers and arthouse distributors available in the market for gritty style fare and promising new expertise.

These males could look terrifying, however for Lesia they’re like household: surrogate uncles, a beloved godfather named Joseph (Thomas Bronzini), a junior mobster Santu (Andrea Cossu) who treats her like a child sister. She is aware of this world, is accustomed to its guidelines (no questions, completely no calls from the cellphone in the home the place they’re hiding out). Even so, she initially chafes in opposition to the interruption to her plans and tries to name her boyfriend, first from a cellphone field and, later, when the boys have left en masse for a council of struggle, illicitly from the villa itself.

It’s shortly after she does this that the violence escalates and the physique rely begins to rise. Responsible for breaking her father’s cardinal rule, and petrified of dropping her one remaining mother or father (her mom died when Lesia was a lot youthful), she slips away from the minders who have been meant to ship her again to the relative security of her aunt’s home, and returns to her father’s facet. Because the noose tightens, Lesia and her father are pressured to go on the run collectively. For Lesia, who hunts boar – one thing she secretly hates  – simply so she will be able to spend time along with her dad, the possibility to cover out in a vacation camp, virtually like a traditional household, is one thing to be treasured.

Colonna is adept at capturing the sudden temperature modifications within the room every time information filters via of one other casualty within the escalating blood feud – the boys are reliant on native tv information, which runs studies about automotive bombs and drive-by shootings alongside incongruously chipper studies about back-to-school procuring. Gun crime, the movie suggests, is simply an accepted a part of the daily cloth of life in Corsica. However the eye for an eye fixed for an eye fixed inevitability of the biking violence on this assured drama doesn’t reduce the movie’s efficiency.