‘Gagarine’ soars as tale of abandonment, loss and dream of reaching for the stars
A lovely, science-fictiontinted meditation on themes of boyhood loss and abandonment, “Gagarine,” a Cannes official selection, has a fascinating back story. It was shot around the reallife closing and demolition of Cite Gagarine, a 370apartment-sized piece of public housing in Ivry-surSeine built on the “Red Belt” in the south of Paris and inaugurated by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin himself in the early 1960s. The decision to demolish was made in 2014. The event witnessed by many former inhabitants did not happen until 2019.
“Gagarine” is the story of a 16-year-old boy named Youri (soulful newcomer Alseni Bathily). He was given the name because of his love for space travel and astronomy. Youri’s mother has met a new man and is starting a family with him. She has left Youri behind in the apartment they shared, leaving him notes and money for food. But he is isolated and unhappy and takes refuge in his telescope, his dreams of space travel and being the neighborhood oddball. He is, however, hailed when he sets up a large tarp enabling his neighbors to watch a solar eclipse.
But as the deadline to the demolition approaches, Youri loses touch with reality and holes up in his flat, creating a greenhouse garden and making what looks like machinery and surroundings to accompany him on a space voyage. The building itself, which Youri plans to pilot from his “station” on the roof, is going to be Youri’s rocket to the stars.
All of this is a cause for concern to us and his friends Diana (Lyna Khoudri), a Romany girl who lives in a trailer nearby, and Houssam (Jamil McCraven). Also worried about Youri is his mother’s friend Fari (Farida
Rahouadj).
Directors Fanny Liatard and Jeremy Trouilh, making their debut, were commissioned by architects to shoot documentary portraits of some of the housing’s tenants, giving them footage that is invaluable to their fiction film. Using new, young faces and a real housing project about to be torn down gives “Gagarine” the air of a documentary.
Bathily’s character, an
abandoned angel, gives the story its fictional wings. That and the remarkable visual lyricism of the filmmakers and the music and sound design. You will see a whirling dervish dance to reggae music and a boy scrounging and salvaging to jaunty, electronic ditty that might have been used in an episode of “Star Trek.”
A small turn by French film icon and Leos Carax regular Denis Lavant com
pletes the sense that “Gagarine” is unlike any coming-of-age film you have ever seen.
“Gagarine” assures us that the wretched of the earth, especially the children, have the same dreams as their more prosperous brethren. In one of the most beautiful images in the film, Diana flashes a message in Morse code to Youri from the top of a giant crane. Who says these children cannot live
their dreams?
The directors use stock footage of Gagarine at its beginning and footage of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster to give the film added history and heft. This is a film about a place as full of ghosts as the Overlook Hotel, as well as a tall, lonely and imaginative boy. Prepare for liftoff.
(“Gagarine” contains profanity, scenes of hardship and emotional distress.)