Les Particules (2019)
Directed by Blaise Harrison

Film Review

After cutting his teeth on a dozen or so documentaries and shorts, Blaise Harrison makes his feature debut proper with Les Particules, a cinematic oddity that brings a startlingly fresh perspective to the somewhat over-mined teen movie concept.  The film is set on the director's home turf of the Pays de Gex in northeastern France, which is where the world's largest particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider - is sited, a hundred metres below ground.

You'd have thought that Harrison would have gone to town with the idea of scientists mucking about with the fundamental forces of nature, unleashing untold mayhem on the fabric of reality as they fire bits of matter and antimatter at each other.  But no, the connection between atom smashing and a teenager's existential angst proves to be a tenuous one - although no doubt it will inspire some Hollywood executive to run with the idea and make it the subject of yet another blockbuster disaster epic in a year or two.

A decent sci-fi premise may have gone by the wayside, but this is probably no bad thing.  What Harrison delivers is a far more intriguing and innovative work.  It is more cinéma vérité than genre offering, anchored in the kind of raw social realism that the respected Dardenne brothers have made their trademark.  At the beginning, Les Particules has more in common with a fly-on-the-wall documentary than a fictional drama, introducing a rebellious teenager P.A. who loves doing all the things that boys of his age get up to - making life hell for his teachers at school and hanging about with his equally wild classmates.  Drugs, loud music and cruelty to girls are just three of the key elements of his existence.

But, gradually, this seeming normality starts to break up as P.A. begins nurturing a growing unease with the world around him.  Like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel (e.g. Time Out of Joint), the adolescent senses that not everything is as it seems and that beneath the surface reality of his everyday perceptions there is another reality trying to break through.  Is he imagining things?  Has he eaten too many magic mushrooms?  Or is reality as he knows it genuinely falling apart, with portals to parallel worlds suddenly becoming apparent to him?  As P.A.'s anxieties increase, so the film becomes increasingly weird, with unusual camera set-ups, image treatment and the eeriest soundtrack imaginable all being employed to reflect the growing disorientation of its main protagonist.

Harrison's experience as a documentary filmmaker shows both in the striking naturalism of the film in its saner passages and his decision to employ exclusively non-professional actors.  Thomas Daloz was a lucky find, and in the role of P.A. he gives a portrait of adolescent alienation that is both fascinating and intensely disturbing.  Like his fellow actors, Daloz appears to typify a generation of youngsters that seem to have become disconnected from the world, partly by technology (following the iPhone revolution), but also through a deep-seated anxiety about what the future holds for them, an anxiety that they struggle to articulate in a meaningful way.

Les Particules touches on the existential threat posed by scientists' unbridled quest for knowledge (some have already speculated that machines like the LHC might one day create a black hole that could swallow up the entire planet), but what it conveys most convincingly is the understandable alienation of a generation that is beginning to wake up to the terrifying future that mankind now faces as the world begins to hit back after a century of relentless plunder and desecration.  As one reality fades from view - the insane delusion that we inhabit a world of infinite resources - so another reality emerges to take its place, one with doom etched on every quark.

Film Synopsis

In the Pays de Gex, a region of France on the border with Switzerland, Pierre-André (who prefers to be known as P.A.) is in his last year at school.  100 metres beneath his feet is the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, which an international team of scientists are using to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang to better understand the physical composition of the universe.  With the onset of winter, P.A. begins noticing some bizarre changes in the world around him.  Is he imagining things or can it be that reality is somehow being reshaped by the experimenters at CERN?  His worst fears appear to be confirmed when his best friend Mérou suddenly goes missing during a school outing...