Out of all the film genres, the one the French probably do the best is the coming-of-age movie. It’s not hard to find lots of great examples: Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Eustache’s Mes Petites Amoureuses, Pialat’s L’enfance nue and A nos amours (To Our Loves), Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, to name only a few. Film historians may have a good academic explanation for this phenomenon, but if I were to venture a guess, it would be that French auteurs, especially those from the New Wave onwards, tend to reject the cut-and-dry, over-scripted narratives of Hollywood movies in favor of something more honest, messy and personal — which is very much the definition of adolescence.   

For her stunning feature debut, La Gradiva, cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan tackles the genre in the most French way possible, delivering a sprawling chronicle of teenage angst that starts off as a laid-back class trip to Italy and gradually turns into a devastating tale of loss. Featuring an impressive cast of unknowns and a style that captures them with both beauty and verisimilitude, this deserved winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize announces the arrival of a formidable new talent.

What makes Atlan’s film feel at once fresh and part of a long tradition of great French teen movies is how she fills it with new faces, outfits, attitudes and sexual preferences, yet portrays the kind of dramas that have been happening since drama was invented. Indeed, the iconic setting of La Gradiva, which follows a class of high school seniors to Naples and Pompeii, is used to frame this story of unrequited love and adolescent turmoil against precious artifacts from ancient times — frescoes, statues and calcified bodies in agony — depicting the very same things thousands of years ago. Times may have changed, and everyone’s glued to their phones now, but feelings are still feelings.

This is immediately apparent in the movie’s opening scene, which shows charismatic class fuck-up Toni (Colas Quignard) spying on his handsome best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) while the latter sleeps with a fellow student on the train down from Paris. Toni, who is gay, looks on with curiosity and a fair amount of jealousy as James — the class ladies’ man and a nonchalantly good student — canoodles, and then some, with a girl, setting the stage for a conflict that takes over much of the film’s second half.

The other conflict Toni faces is with his own origins: His maternal grandmother was a Neapolitan chambermaid who claims she had an illicit love affair with a local aristocrat, until the latter was killed in a 1980 earthquake that destroyed Naples and the surrounding region. Now Toni is back to possibly reconnect with his roots, even if he doesn’t speak much Italian and no longer has contact with that side of the family.

Toni’s dual quests fuel a story that appears to be casually constructed but grows considerably darker and more dramatic as time passes. The first hour or so of La Gradiva actually seems, at times, like a loose-limbed French hangout movie, with the kind of authentic attitudes and performances that directors like Kechiche have done so well beforehand. Atlan brilliantly channels the ebb and flow of shifting moods — the way a joke can suddenly transform into a bitter fight, or the way a glance at another classmate during a museum visit can speak volumes about loneliness and longing. But she gradually homes in on the three-or-four-way love affair at the center of her plot.

If Toni is the film’s protagonist, and James his object of desire, a narrator appears in Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), the top student in their Latin class but also the one with the least social ties. In a disarming scene between Suzanne and other girls as they chill out in the dorm one night, they ask her why she hasn’t had sex yet and she says to them: “Have you seen my face?” It’s this kind of crushing honesty that characterizes the film itself, as if Atlan were a fly on the wall with a camera (the director, who shot last year’s Cannes entry The Girl in the Snow, served as DP along with Pierre Mazoyer).

There is so much more going on both above and beneath the surface of La Gradiva, whether it’s the class disparities between Toni and James, or the sexual fluidity of the latter, that it’s impossible to jam it all into one review. Atlan’s movie even seems to digress at times, especially during a few long lecture scenes by the group’s dedicated if disillusioned teacher, Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi), who emerges as the other main character: a woman whose cultural passions betray lots of deep longing as well.

But everything we see is happening for a reason, leading to Toni’s increased isolation and erratic behavior, until a chain of events sets off an absolutely heartbreaking finale. Before that occurs, Atlan captures the students celebrating one last night abroad together, dancing and rapping along to singer Theodora’s club anthem “Kongolese sous BBL” as they each find out what college they’re going to next year.

As in many scenes of her splendid debut, the director warmly trains her camera on the collective cast’s elated faces and bodies, catching them between ecstasy and anxiety, between fear and elation — young adults looking toward the future but forever caught in the dramas of our past.