The cult director grew up on the luscious island of Madagascar just as it was casting off French rule. It was a deliriously happy time for him – but now he realises what was really going on
Robin Campillo’s new movie, Red Island, is an amazing, moving evocation of his own childhood in Madagascar as what the Anglo-Saxons call an “army brat”. His soldier dad was posted there with the family in the early days of the island’s independence from French imperial control – and the 10-year-old roamed free in this lush and gorgeous place, but all the time aware of sexual licence among the grownups, their wan melancholy at their imminent expulsion from this paradise and the increasingly pointed anti-colonial rumblings among the Indigenous people. The boy is almost like young Jim in JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (played by Christian Bale in Spielberg’s film version) wandering with absolute liberty in the chaos of wartime occupied Shanghai – only here it’s with more sunshine and more erotic languor.
When I meet Campillo in the London offices of his UK distributor Curzon, he is a dynamic, athletic and yet also somehow cherubic figure with close-cropped grey hair (you can almost see him as a little kid), sparkling with energy and eagerness to talk about this movie, along with his career and what it all adds up to so far.
He has long been a powerful presence in French and world cinema, both as editor and screenwriter for the works of director Laurent Cantet, including Time Out and his Cannes Palme d’Or-winning schoolroom drama The Class, but also as a director for his own movies. His cult neo-zombie film They Came Back was developed into a hit streaming series for French TV; his intense drama Eastern Boys was nominated for Césars and won an award in Venice.
And most prominently, his overwhelmingly passionate 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) in 2017 – based on his own experiences as a gay man in 80s Paris, working for the activist group Act Up, demanding action on Aids – was the film that Pedro Almodóvar declared to be his favourite at Cannes and had Barry Jenkins raving on social media. Now he has surrendered to the flow of memory and reached back into his own past.
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