Noir océan (2010)
Directed by Marion Hänsel

Film Review

Noir Océan, the tenth full-length film from Belgian filmmaker Marion Hänsel, weaves together a dark commentary on France's nuclear weapons testing programme of the 1970s with a haunting meditation on the traumas of adolescence - a curious mélange of themes which only just fails to gel into a coherent whole.  The film is inspired by two short stories from a book entitled Océan Pacifique by the French author Hubert Mingarelli, a writer for whom Hänsel has a close affinity. One of Belgium's most prominent independent filmmakers and producers, Hänsel was voted her country's Woman of the Year in 1987 for her daring film Les Noces barbares, a provocative study in the breakdown in the relationship between a mother and her son.

Hänsel's most recent film adopts a similarly realist style but has a far more visible political edge to it.  Noir Océan contains a veiled condemnation of the way that governments cynically exploit the armed services, subjecting them to hazards of which they are not fully aware, and then failing to offer adequate compensation once the hazards have taken their toll.  Between 1960 and 1996, France carried out over 200 nuclear tests involving around 150 thousand personnel.  It was not until 2010 that a law was passed in France to compensate victims of these tests (22 years after a similar law came into effect in the United States).

Whilst it quite clearly has a political axe or two to grind, Noir Océan is primarily a coming-of-age story, revolving around three fragile, uncommunicative young men (probably in their late teens, early twenties) whose process of self-discovery is frustrated by the harsh military regime to which they subject themselves.  It is unclear just why these men are where they are (it is a fair bet they are reluctant conscripts), and indeed the film tells us next to nothing about their background.  By revealing so little about the characters, Hänsel makes great demands of her audience and the film's central weakness is that we never really get to understand just who the main protagonists are - they are just generic lost adolescents, too abstract and ill-defined to be all that interesting or convincing, despite some very creditable performances from a talented trio of actors (Adrien Jolivet, Nicolas Robin and Romain David).

The film's lack of character depth and languorous pacing are at least partially redeemed by the lyrical beauty of its composition.  Watching it is like staring into the eerily calm waters of the sea after a storm - you can't quite make it out but there is something dark and sinister just beneath the surface.  The monster that we anticipate is revealed to us, only fleetingly, in the film's disturbing but imperfectly realised conclusion.  After the sailors have done their duty and violated the natural world with another hideously  pointless atom bomb test, we see them visibly transformed.  They have lost their innocence and seem suddenly to have acquired an ungainly self-awareness.  One of the men has metamorphosed into a mindless brute, thoughtlessly lobbing live crabs onto a fire.  It's a replay of the familiar fall of man scenario, with a predictably blunt eco-slant.

Noir Océan had the potential to be a powerful and insightful film drama, but Hänsel's inability or unwillingness to fully engage with her subject and her characters prevents it from being anything more than a vague curiosity piece.  The political-environmental messages are timely and well constructed but could perhaps have been delivered with more subtlety, although the film's principal failing is that it fails to take us inside the characters and thereby give us a more vivid impression of how they are altered by their experiences in an atom bomb test.   For all its unsettling lyrical beauty, Noir Océan is frustratingly insubstantial and you end up wondering just what exactly its director is trying to say.

Film Synopsis

In 1972, three young sailors aboard a French naval vessel are to take part in atomic bomb tests on the Pacific island of Mururoa.  Their names are Moriaty, Massina and Da Maggio, and they barely out of their teens.  None of them is remotely aware of the danger he and his comrades are exposing themselves to, nor of the devastating impact their work could have on the world's environment.  It will be many years before they realise the extent of their naivety...