“Gavan” isn’t the first film, nonfiction or otherwise, to make a long-term investment in a child protagonist, spending years following the children as they gradually approach adulthood. Maxence Voisiou’s films have clear precedent in documentary projects such as Michael Apted’s groundbreaking 7 Up series, Robert David Cochran’s The Boys of Summer, and, of course, Richard Linklater’s slow-paced story Boyhood. But somehow this concept feels like a miracle every time. There’s something enlightening and indescribably moving about watching someone grow before your eyes in a quasi-time-lapse fashion. This is especially evident in “Gavan,” which compresses 10 years of childhood spent in a rural village into less than two hours. It’s a stunningly quick and fluent feat of observation and editing that still conveys the subject’s unsettling, ongoing fear that life might stop before it even begins.
A boy’s unstable home life, academic difficulties, and volatile ambitions in the neglected northern part of France’s Artois region may seem like a niche cinematic interest to many, but Gabin (one of two documentaries on this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program) is compelling, human, and universal enough to travel far beyond the small world of our perceptual worlds. The Docfest circuit will clearly be the main track in Voiseau’s filmography following Croisette Vault, all the more impressive as it is his first feature after Croisette Vault, but specialist non-fiction distributors and streamers would be well advised to investigate films with as much crossover audience appeal as the artistic breakthroughs of Nicolas Philibert and Sébastien Lifshitz.
Although it functions as a completely stand-alone film, Gabin is actually an offshoot of Voiseux’s 2016 medium-length film The Heirs, which first established the director’s interest in the working-class Jourdel family, centering primarily on Andre, a veteran working-class cattle trader, and his three adult sons who break into the family business. One of those sons, Dominic the butcher, had three sons, the youngest of whom was Gavan, who was eight years old at the time, and was a background figure in the short film.
Gavan, filmed over the next 10 years, obviously puts children at the forefront. His brother is not seen on camera. He also has no other relatives other than Dominic and Patricia. Patricia is a mother who adores Gavan, and she herself makes a living as a cattle farmer. Gavan’s dramatically conflicted relationships with his parents (each practicing very different kinds of care) give the film its spine and tension, but the boy is at war with himself as often and with just as much urgency as he is with the possibilities and limits of his rural environment, what he wants out of life and where he wants it over time.
Given that Gavan is a child who loves animals more than most from an early age, Stephanie raising cows and Dominic slaughtering them is a symbolic dichotomy that defines much of the conflict here. “I want to work with animals, and I work with live animals,” the 8-year-old says early in the lawsuit, as the camera watches him tightly cradling various stunted cows on Stephanie’s farm. Later, on the drive home, he stroked Patricia’s hair and exclaimed that it was “soft as cowhide.” For him, his mother’s livelihood and child rearing are inseparable, but an emotional wedge continues to widen between them from an early age due to hostility towards his father’s profession. In fact, the opening shot of the film shows Dominic at the kitchen table, looking at Gavan fondly but bewildered. “I’m trying to see who you look like,” he explains, but over time, his son never fully mirrors Gavan.
At school, Gavin appears to have few friends other than Lilloo, a loyal girl who serves as his sounding board until adulthood. The other boys, he says, are “okay, but there are things I don’t understand, and there are things I say they don’t understand.” Although his social skills improve over time, he always seems at his calmest when he’s around animals, from the various beasts on the farm to his own skinny kitten. He’s also with the ever-patient Patricia, who doesn’t always understand him, but is happy even if she doesn’t.
Gavin’s poor performance in school is eventually diagnosed as the result of a working memory deficit. Catherine, a kind tutor, also functions as a kind of therapist, trusting her with fears she cannot always share with her parents. All the while, his dreams for the future oscillate between helping his mother run the farm, breeding sheepdogs, and perhaps exploring life beyond the cloudy confines of Artois. Director Voissou, who also has family roots in the area, shoots Gabin’s environment with care and empathy, but he also captures the restless, repetitive atmosphere in tight, Academy-style proportions, as if approaching his protagonist as he enters adolescence. Although the discreet horn music matches his frequent melancholy, Gavan and “Gavan” are able to plunge into bliss and escape. In his late teens, an apprentice shepherd in the mountains is found actively providing oxygen, conveyed through wide shots of towering lush greenery.
But for much of the doc, the camera’s presence is barely perceptible, impossibly close, capturing every tiny domestic detail and personal crisis written on its face without any hint that Voiseux’s subjects are playing with the lens. Like many great documentarians, Voiseux sheds light on lives that would otherwise be unseen, but does not single them out for academic scrutiny. We can feel what changes and realizations have taken place in the film’s temporal leaps and ellipses, leaving Gavan on the brink of a journey of adulthood and formation, with his own story to tell at his own time.
