Gabin
Gracefully condensing a decade’s worth of footage, this tender nonfiction gem out of Cannes chronicles the adolescence of a boy in northern France.
Young Gabin Jourdel lives in Artois, an agricultural region in economic decline. His mother, Patricia, is a cattle farmer; his father, Dominique, a butcher. Dominique intends for Gabin to one day take over his business, but even at the age of eight, the boy has reservations; demonstrably less at ease with his peers than with the Brown Swiss cows tended to by his mother, he would prefer to work with “living animals”. Over 10 years, as he grows up in front of director Maxence Voiseux’s camera, Gabin negotiates not only the burdens of familial expectation but also the limitations of his rural environment.
Voiseux achieves a seamless, effortlessly intimate vérité style that suggests immense trust on the part of the Jourdel family, who first appeared in the director’s 2016 mid-length film The Heirs (this earlier documentary focusing on Dominique, his two brothers and their own cattle dealer father). Recalling both Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (MIFF 2014) and the beloved Up series (MIFF 1986), Gabin, with its quietly grand scope, is a poignant, truly impressive feature-length debut.
“There’s something illuminating and ineffably moving about watching someone grow up before your eyes in quasi-timelapse fashion, and especially so in Gabin … a remarkably fleet, fluent feat of observation.” – Variety
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