A film follows French high school students traveling to Naples and Pompeii, using the ruins as a backdrop for personal transformation. The story treats teenagers as fully realized people with fears, desires, ambitions, loneliness, and dreams. Their messy emotions include sensitivity and cruelty, shaped by pressures about impending futures and close contact with one another. The title connects to a Pompeian fantasy about an archaeologist obsessed with an imagined woman, and to psychological and surrealist interpretations. The film centers on layers beneath consciousness, where desires and fears build until they overflow. It also examines how people project surface versions of themselves onto others, and how shallow understanding can distort judgment.
"Cinematographer Marine Atlan's feature film directorial debut " La Gradiva" takes a simple premise - teenagers on a class trip - and uses it to explore the vast worlds of their individual interiority with insight, empathy, and grace. Mercifully free of typical high school movie tropes, the teenagers at the heart of Atlan's film are fully realized people, whose fears and desires and ambitions and loneliness and dreams, as well as the intensity of their messy teenage feelings, are treated utmost respect by Atland and co-writer Anne Brouillet, allowing their work to reach toward the sublime."
"Like the novel and the works it inspired, Atlan's film is about the layers below our consciousness, where our desires and our fears and our anger boil until we can no longer contain them. But it's also about the way that we project a version of ourselves to others, and the dangers of allowing our surface level understanding of people to affect our judgments of them."
"We first meet this rowdy troupe of French high schoolers, who are awaiting their college acceptance letters as they travel to Naples via train, where they will not only discover the ruins of Pompeii and all that the destruction wrought by Vesuvius has trapped in time, but also who they are becoming as they move into the adult world. These kids are messy and raw, they're smart and sensitive, but also have the capacity for cruelty."
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