For his 14thfeature film in 20 years, Stakhanovist Christophe Honoré bursts a heavy abscess: the death of his father when he was only a teenager. By fantasizing his memories through his tormented hero, he delivers, with The High School Student, a very beautiful drama about human relationships, where fatherhood is omnipresent.
The High School Student: a beautiful solar drama, with inhabited actors
He will soon not spend a year without a film by Christophe Honoré. In total, 14 feature films since her first, 17 times Cécile Cassard, released 20 years ago. A frantic pace for this artist, also a novelist and director, which does not prevent him from addressing various themes such as homosexuality, mourning, suicide or family. Le Lycéen, the author's latest production, seems to be the synthesis of his cinema centered around human relationships. 
Lucas is a 17-year-old high school student whose life is turned upside down when his father dies suddenly in a car accident. While the absence of this protective figure awakens demons in him, he remains surrounded by his brother and mother to continue to hope, live, love. For sure, Le Lycéen will not reconcile Christophe Honoré's detractors with his art. In a naturalistic logic, the passion of the actors and the latent idleness of their characters will revulse the most refractory to this bourgeois aesthetic of cinema.
The art of the character
Because with his latest work, the filmmaker gives himself body and soul, with, from the introduction, a marvel of cutting that is offered to the spectators. A country road, Savoyard coldness and a makeshift tombstone, before arriving on a sluggish young man comforted by his mother in a car. Death and mourning will be omnipresent in the minds of the protagonists. Christophe Honoré, who plays this father figure himself, becomes here "the ghost of his father", recreating, by meta-writing, his adolescent trauma. But no question of cinematographic psychoanalysis of an artist exposing his cracks, whatever this is a good pleonasm. The artist fantasizes this feeling of abandonment of being through Lucas, his hero of a film, who will gradually fall into the abyss at the age when thoughts collide. His relationship with his mother, the discovery of another family cocoon in his brother, dark ideas, so many elements that will flesh out the psyche of a character voluntarily contradictory in his actions and words. Honoré also has the genius idea of filming his moments of reflection, in a beautiful theatricality, then dodging the unwieldy trap of the voice-over. 
Tender bourgeois
As close as possible to the characters, the staging shines by the sensitivity it transmits by simple gestures, Honoré hesitating with his camera while remaining adept at tight and rarely fixed shots. And what could have been a lazy approach is actually a magnificent bond between the protagonists and the spectator, taking us to the heart of their turpitudes. The filmmaker chains clear situations that summon in themselves more emotions than the real traumas suggested on the screen. The High School Student is a film made of flesh and blood, where feelings seem palpable, at hand. The film, however, navigates on a thread, between the delicious lightness of the being and the melodramatic knock. At a few moments, rather rare it will be admitted, Christophe Honoré seems in the hard to renew the situations, creating a dissonant feeling that can culminate, at choice, boredom or annoyance. A bit like Paul Kircher (seen in T'as pécho?), whose naturalness can pierce the screen as much as make you sigh. A "16th arrondissement" performance by a great actor who has not yet quite hatched, especially when magnificent actors like Vincent Lacoste or Juliette Binoche shine next to him. The real revelation of the film remains Erwan Kepoa Falé, wonderful presence and charm. With its velvet staging and its quest for reality, Le Lycéen is a breath of fresh air with a beautiful emotional breath. In the care given to the relationships between his characters, Christophe Honoré delivers perhaps his best film, the one that resonates and tenderizes the most. If adventures the whole has its legitimate weaknesses, the filmmaker revealing himself as rarely, it remains a solar and moving drama, with inhabited actors. https://youtu.be/bnpM1JAmX60
