Goodbye, Cruel World

It’s an eerily familiar spectacle. A reserved, dark-haired teenage boy (Otto, played by Milo Machado-Graner of Anatomy of a Fall) walks into the woods alone, still smarting from the night-long pursuit of vicious bullies. His voice declares in flat monotone that what happens next is not suicide, but murder, of which his entire class is guilty, and if the Catholic teachings to which they have adhered ring true in the end, he will see them all in hell. Then, with the minimum of hesitation, the boy leaps from a bridge into the rushing waters below. This queasy-but-commanding opener to Felix de Givry’s debut feature does, for a moment, leave open multiple doors to step through. Will the film’s remainder be a stark treatise on the isolation and despair of so many young men and boys, backtracking in time to trace the mental health decline, parental neglect, institutional failings, bullying and whatever else that may have set this one on his path? Or will the remainder be a community diorama, tracing the aftershock of the event on all those left behind, not least the classmates indicted in his suicide note (in which he half-heartedly takes care to leave exactly two of his peers exempt from charges)? Still, there’s a catch that will close these doors as promptly as they’ve been opened. The boy is not dead at all, the rushing waters leaving him soaked and breathless on the shore instead of at the river bottom. Dead or not, though, the suicide note has still been copied and mailed to each of his classmates. The plan went off without a hitch, save for the final touches.

There is a rich vein of satire to be plumbed in Goodbye, Cruel World, if the film were more inclined to find it and stare it in the face. With the community reeling and frantically searching, the boy is left to watch from the sidelines, as if he’s found his way into a more vindictive variant of that classic fantasy of attending your own funeral. There are such natural grounds for dark comedy in it that the movie’s persistent solemnity can be enervating, but it also rings true to what interests de Givry more: the high intensity of teenage experience. His film has the deep sincerity befitting its characters’ age group, and when Otto is found and sheltered by a classmate named Lena (Jane Beever) in an unused room of the inn her mother owns, Arnaud Toulon’s stately score begins to twinkle, and the tone shifts from eerily undefinable to a mode of fablelike near-whimsy. Otto could almost be ET, fallen from the sky and in need of hiding from whichever grown-up comes snooping around.

Insofar as this lengthy midsection is a success, it’s largely due to the persuasive, irony-free performances of its two young leads, who circle each other with equal unease and intrigue. Beever especially does much to locate Lena’s inner life with only meagre supplies to work with from de Givry’s script, which, aside from gesturing at her general loneliness, doesn’t offer much to explain what draws her to Otto, not least when their dynamic takes a romantic pivot as seemingly inescapable as it is slightly dispiriting. Without that shading, Cruel World can risk seeming like a skilfully made dramatisation of a different kind of juvenile wish-fulfilment fantasy: that all it would take is drastic action (suicide attempt or otherwise) to get your crush to see and fall for the sensitive, poetically wounded soul you’ve been all along.

In its homestretch, the movie pivots again from dreamy teen love story to a different kind of shaggy dog story, strange and sad. Still, as the town continues in its confused grieving process for someone who is very much alive, one remains tempted to see the funny side. Mileage will vary on whether what has been offered instead delivers worthier results.

Ultimately, Goodbye, Cruel World marks a confident, commanding debut from director Felix de Givry, driven by strong lead performances. Still, the story can feel torn between too much (a narrator is on hand to provide extensive commentary on the feelings of the characters) and not enough, with the audience left to fill in some key emotional blanks in spite of this.