Quand on a 17 ans
Céline’s Role: Co-screenwriter
with André Téchiné
English Title
Being
17 (Literal translation: When You Are 17 years)
Year
2016
Form
Feature film (1h 56mins)
Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Damien lives with his
mother, a doctor, while his soldier father is on a mission.
At high school, Tom picks a fight with him.
The violence Damien and Tom mete out against each other will evolve when
Damien's mother decides to welcome Tom into the family home.
Trailer
Director
André Téchiné
Honours/Awards
- Nominee, Golden Berlin Bear. André Téchiné. Berlin International Film Festival 2016
- Nominee, Teddy, Best Feature Film. André Téchiné. Berlin International Film Festival 2016
- Winner, Golden Swann, Best New Male: Kacey Mottet Klein. Cabourg Romantic Film Festival 2016
- Nominee, 2017 César for Most Promising Actor: Corentin Fila
- Nominee, 2017 César for Most Promising Actor: Kacey Mottet Klein
- Nominee, Dorian Award, LGBTQ Film of the Year. GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics 2017
- Nominee, ICS Award, Best Supporting Actress Sandrine Kiberlain. 2017 International Cinephile Society Awards
- Nominee, Best Film Not in the English Language. 2017 International Cinephile Society Awards
- Nominee, 2017 Lumiere Award Most Promising Actor: Corentin Fila
- Nominee, 2017 Lumiere Award Most Promising Actor Kacey Mottet Klein
- Nominee, Audience Award Best Narrative Feature, André Téchiné. Sydney Film Festival 2016
Excerpts from reviews
Rotten Tomatoes 95%
“With Céline
Sciamma's contribution to the screenplay, André Téchiné signs his most
accomplished film since “Les Témoins”: a very gentle initiatory chronicle.”
Cinema
Files
“Quand on a 17 ans,
which signals the return of André Téchiné to the top of French cinema, explores
a fabulous territory, adolescence, to exalt its ardour, to crystallize this
moment when the feeling of being unique in world is so strong that it becomes
true.”
Le
Monde
“When you see something like Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood,
or André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds — French films, made 20 years apart, that
both fearlessly confront the volatility of growing up—it becomes very
difficult to go back to stories that have been told with the bumpers on. And
when you see something like Being 17, which Sciamma and Téchiné just
co-wrote together (with the latter directing), it becomes virtually
impossible. A slow, shaggy, hyper-naturalistic coming-of-age drama that
constantly returns to the sheer violence of becoming a man, this is a movie
that isn’t the least bit afraid to dwell on how hard it can be to become who
you are. Or, in this case, how much harder it can be when you’re a boy who’s in
love with his bully.”
Indiewire
https://www.indiewire.com/2016/10/being-17-review-techine-sciamma-1201733818/
“Inevitable
comparisons will be made to director Andre Techine’s most personal
film, Wild Reeds, which also explored the destabilizing force of
teenage desire in a rural setting ruptured by a distant war. Likewise, a
connective tissue can be traced to the limpid gaze of co-writer Celine Sciamma’s coming-of-age
stories about sexual identity: Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood.
But Being 17 is more expansive in scope and richer in tone than any
of those thematically related works; it’s an intimate epic that builds in
wholly unexpected ways to a final act of searing poignancy.
It
shouldn’t be surprising that Techine and Sciamma work so
well together. Both filmmakers generally favor observation-driven storytelling
over plot mechanics, depicting complex internalized feelings without forcing
their characters to spell them out. The sensitivity of their work is resistant
to sentimentality.”
The Hollywood Reporter
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/being-17-berlin-review-865118/
“It
must therefore be said from the outset: Quand on a 17 ans is
what he (Téchiné) has done best since Wild Reeds. It is also about
adolescent love, body and nature, skin and sorrow. But no repetitions for
all that: each film has its era, its actors, its colors, its moods. The
arrival of Céline Sciamma as co-scriptwriter (Naissance de
Pieuvres, Tomboy, Bande de Filles) was surely
decisive; it brought the acuity of a glance on this moving and
overwhelming age, also its faculty to put the romantic in the intimate and the
emotion in the triviality.”
L’Espress
https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/cinema/quand-on-a-17-ans-un-melo-qui-se-coltine-le-quotidien_1774608.html
Translated by Google
“To that end, Techine was understandably eager to work with
Sciamma, whose three finger-on-the-pulse features to date—Water Lilies, Tomboy
and Girlhood — display an insight into the behavior of contemporary
young people, while never reducing the complex and frequently contradictory
question of sexual identity to a simple matter of gay or straight. Perhaps such
clarity does arrive with age, but for many adolescents, desire is a threatening
and alien sensation when it first arrives, less about “I like girls” or “I like
boys” than an overwhelming attraction to a specific individual. As self-doubting
Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) eventually finds the strength to admit to classmate
Thomas (Corentin Fila), “I don’t know if I’m into guys or just you.”
Variety
https://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/being-17-film-review-andre-techine-1201705918/
“The tender drama returns to the subject of
adolescent sexual awakening, the theme of one of the filmmaker's best-known
features, 1994's Les Rouseaux
Savage (Wild Reeds). Where that movie was set at a
historical remove—in the early 1960s, with the Beach Boys on the soundtrack—this
one is contemporary and immediate. The movie's directness must owe something to
co-scripter Celine Sciamma, who's made such smart coming-of-age films as Tomboy and Bande de Filles (Girlhood).”
Notes
This film is widely viewed as a comeback film
for legendary French filmmaker André Téchiné, and a number of reviews credit Céline
Sciamma contributions as co-scriptwriter for this success.
About the writing process
“Why did you enlist Céline Sciamma to
co-write the screenplay?
I had a lot of admiration for what she’s brought
to French film, the innovative side of her work on adolescence, and I knew that
my film would revolve around two teenagers. Moreover, I wanted the film to
contain as little dialogue as possible, for it to be as physical as possible as
you have these characters that aren’t capable of putting their experience into
words at all. In writing the screenplay, myself and Céline very much agreed on
this, on creating something extremely minimalistic when it came to dialogue.”
https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/305379/
“To write the screenplay for Quand
on a 17 ans, André Téchiné collaborated with a specialist in the
pangs of adolescence, Céline Sciamma: "André and I worked
together, at the table, on the sequencer. I then gave him a first dialogue
continuity—a kind of reinterpretation of what we had written. He took over the
text alone then we worked together again", Céline analyzes. We owe in
particular to the filmmaker Naissance de Pieuvres with Adèle
Haenel, featuring the troubled relationship between two young girls and Bande
de Filles, telling the story of a group of young teenage girls. This
time, the artist tackled a story featuring two teenagers who tear each other
apart and who do not accept their attraction. Note that Téchiné had
already staged adolescence in Les Roseaux Sauvage (Wild
Reeds) in 1994, notably awarded the César for Best Film.”
https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-229870/secrets-tournage/
(Translated by Google)
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