Wild Diamond
aka Diamant brut First screened and reviewed in May 2024
Director: Agathe Riedinger. Cast: Malou Khebizi, Idir Azougli, Andréa Bescond, Ashley Romano, La Gorla, Kilia Fernane, Alexis Manenti. Screenplay: Agathe Riedinger.VOR:②
Riedinger makes a case for once again telling a story that's familiar in broad outline, but you never quite forget other versions.
As sometimes happens, though I'd never experienced it on the ground, sometimes Cannes only needs one day to rouse a widespread chorus of "why is this movie in Competition?" Sure, you can ask this about outright, Last Face-style howlers or, if you're a dectractor, about love-it-or-hate-it polarizers like Megalopolis or Emilia Pérez, which would alight in Cannes 2024's early going. But I think it's mostly a question for movies that are solid enough but just don't aim high or pay off in ways that seem likely to move anyone's needle.
I was sorry to feel this way about Wild Diamond, especially since Cannes still owes so many back payments to female directors collectively, and I'm equally excited when a first-time feature director cracks the festival's center ring. Unfortunately, it just doesn't feel like the first time we've seen the core structure and guiding aesthetic of Wild Diamond. Its clear, maybe even blatant predecessor is Andrea Arnold's exemplary Fish Tank, and since Arnold was in town for her own Competition bow the following day, it's hard not to wonder how many people suggested to her she'd been pilfered or, more sympathetically, paid homage. Whatever the case, so much of that movie is here: the teen girl in public-housing hoping to dance her way out, the dissolute and antagonistic mother, the young sister who already looks off on a worrying path of loneliness and self-objectification, the looming audition, the ruddy and tactile texture of the photography, the slightly nervous cutaways to "local color" and cosmetic accents of people and spaces, the Academy-ratio frame.
Not, of course, that Wild Diamond is the same movie as Fish Tank or that, even if they were, there'd be no reason to tell this girl's story twice. (There are many archetypes, mostly masculine, that have been recycled to us infinitely more times; we all know this.) After all, Mia in Fish Tank thinks of her dancing as skill-based and athletic and is disgusted to discover all anyone wants is salaciousness. Liane (Malou Khebizi) in Wild Diamond dials up her salacious appeal toward many people in her orbit, toward her growing pool of Instagram devotees, to herself sometimes in the mirror. Liane's formative and her future-facing desires, not just her aspirations as an IG influencer but her craving of a role on some reality TV affront to taste called Miracle Island, bespeak a generational shaping by image culture run riot that Mia could hardly envision (and may well have been bored by). Constant feedback from thousands of strangers, rendered on screen as engraved pronouncements in Roman-style capitals, as disconcerting when laudatory as when hostile, was nowhere on Mia's radar.
Wild Diamond has enough breathability in its structure not to frame itself entirely around whether Liane will or won't snag her thirsted-for spot in the squawky televised Coliseum of mutual defilement and exploitation. To the extent this is the major plot question hanging over the movie (and hanging over Liane, after her aggressive scouting by producers and a promising audition), the movie finds a different question to amplify: what if the sheer terror of not measuring up, prompting ever-increasing needs to affirm rarity and desirability in other, mostly destructive ways, means that a Yes from television might usher Liane to her widest-ever audience at her disastrously lowest point, even if her public is likely to misrecognize her hard tumble as her peak? As might she?
The second half of Wild Diamond mostly transpires in this waiting period, which is the agitated undercurrent of every scene even though it's not always spelled out at their surfaces. I learned something from watching Liane have to improvise, manage her headspace and behavior, even guarantee herself money and food, having bullishly quit her job on the overconfident expectation of this TV gig. She tempts fate in a couple of unwise ways, though writer-director Agathe Riedinger does manage to stay trained on characterization rather than wallowing in lurid, "cautionary" awfulness for its own sake. I also appreciated that the film guarded Liane from some of the worst, most easily conceivable results of her frightening moorlessness, having previously been such a tough customer... which doesn't mean that Wild Diamond feels defanged. You never stop worrying while you watch.
Speaking of auditions, Riedinger's world-building and the overall coaxing out of Liane's spirit and personality are sturdy enough that I'll gladly keep track of this director, of Khebizi, of editor Lila Desiles, of cinematographer Noé Bach, and of costume designer Rachel Raoult. Still, Wild Diamond breaks little new ground within its marked-out terrains of style and theme, staking a stronger claim on promising competence than any unique voice. This is exactly what sidebars like Un Certain Regard, Critics' Week, or even the semi-autonomous (but not really) Directors' Fortnight exist to promote, so the Competition berth for Riedinger does something gnarlier than reek of tokenism: of women directors, of first-timers, of rising French talents. I consider this high-profile placement of a not-obviously-ready movie to be a version of what Wild Diamond is about, activating the same question: what if the highest level of exposure you dream of for yourself, or into which powerful players recruit you, is not the one that will stand you to best, most secure advantage?
I'm not sure Riedinger's developing talent is best served by having her film seem like a curious, box-ticking addition to the Competition, rather than maturing a little longer while still getting an auspicious showcase in the other, "lower" divisions, where the most interested, even sympathetic audiences would have been likely to find it. Critics picking and choosing across those sidebars may also give a film like Wild Diamond a fairer shake than those heeding editorial edicts to cover the entire Main Competition, who can thus have their knives further out when something seems not to belong. Wild Diamond got a lot of "what's this doing here?" responses that, by being booked a few blocks down the street, might have been retranslated as "she's not all the way there yet, but this artist has got something."
And we can ask another question that implicates not just midgrade Cannes titles like Wild Diamond but also markedly superior films in its broad generic tradition: tales of headstrong yet vulnerable young women being relentlessly sexualized and abused, from Fish Tank to Sleeping Beauty (whose director, Julia Leigh, never made another film after the harsh spotlight a Competition slot shone on her own 2011 debut, phenomenal as it was). My question: why, when the Cannes administration goes looking for women auteurs, somehow imagining them as few and far between, do they show such a recurring preference for women telling stories of other women's licentious commodification, or women clawing their way out of other forms of oppression?
This year, Coralie Fargeat's movie was somewhere in the former orbit, Andrea Arnold's in the latter, much as I liked both. In Competition, only Payal Kapadia showed us something unassimilable to these women-in-peril recipes, while Rungano Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a bracing and innovative allegory of clapping back hard at patriarchal violence, got no further than Un Certain Regard, even as it's at least twice the film Wild Diamond is. So, beyond continuing to ask why Thierry Fremaux and the rest of the Cannes team don't program more women, we should keep asking just as loudly, why do they over-reward some veins of female-authored storytelling, however formidable or forgettable, to the ongoing disadvantage of others? Grade:B
