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Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s beautiful debut film about young love, superbly acted and directed. It is a reminder of how fundamentally dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the emotional dramas of our teen years, and to claim we just want to tell our younger selves to relax and get a sense of humour. In fact, those long-repressed moments of euphoria and humiliation, so dangerous and potentially explosive, will guide us for the rest of our lives, whether or not we acknowledge it.

Atlan’s title is a reference to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novella Gradiva, much admired by Sigmund Freud, in which an archaeologist is transfixed by the image he sees in a Roman museum of a woman he names “Gradiva”, or “she who walks”, and imagines that she existed in Pompeii in AD79, the time of the great Vesuvius eruption; it is something about transplanting the image to a time of such catastrophe that brings him to an understanding of his own lost love.

Atlan and her co-writer, Anne Brouillet, imagine a lively class of talented French teenagers (played by newcomers) being led on a stressful but exciting school trip to Pompeii and Naples by their teacher, Mercier, played with superb intelligence and sympathy by Antonia Buresi. She has been brought to the verge of quiet breakdown by emotional frustration and the thankless task of keeping these kids in line. There is a funny and heartbreaking moment when she is asked by the Italian coach driver if she is “on her own”, and embarks on a thoughtful monologue about being without a partner or children – before she realises he was asking if she was leading this class with or without a colleague.

There is one particular pupil who is winding up Mercier; that is Toni (Colas Quignard), who plays his music annoyingly loudly on the train heading to Italy and has failed to get his homework assignment in, despite endless extensions. And it is Toni whom Atlan puts at the centre of the film’s opening tableau on the train in a mysterious, potent nexus of sexual tension. Toni is just outside the door of a couchette, secretly staring in with unreadable voyeurism at his handsome friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) and Angela (Hadya Fofana) who have just had sex; later, James will casually reveal to Toni that it meant nothing to him.

At the same time, secretly watching Toni from the end of the corridor is Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a smart, disaffected girl who is fascinated by Toni and James, and who feels herself the least attractive of the class; she is much given to morosely reading Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. And, yes, she is probably reading too much into the apparent association of victimhood and cleverness in the title. In the girls’ dorm, Suzanne listens with angry lack of empathy to Angela when she complains that James is now cruelly refusing to answer her texts, saying that these are problems she wishes she has and they should be grateful to her for not being hot. “Some women have to be unfuckable for others to be fuckable,” she says. Atlan creates a vividly intense dream sequence for the unhappy, self-important Suzanne in which she appears as the Gravida in Pompeii and also has sex with Angela.

As for Toni, he considers his problems and his own backstory to be the most important of all, and he is electrified by the personal significance of this trip to Pompeii. His mother has always told him that her mother, Toni’s grandmother, was a maid in a grand castle in Pompeii having a tragic love affair with the aristocratic master, and had to leave when the castle was reduced to rubble and chaos by the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy. It was this poignantly forbidden love affair that caused his grandmother to get pregnant, Toni believes, and the earthquake, so thrillingly analogous to the Vesuvius eruption they are here to learn about, explained her departure to France. Toni likes to get high in Pompeii and hook up with guys he meets online, but his main mission is to discover the truth about his noble lineage.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork. A nerdy guy called Jean-Eudes (Mathéo De Carlo) thrills Mercier and irritates the entire class with his brilliant exegesis of the imagery. Mercier brings just as much commitment to an alfresco geological class in which the pupils have to learn about the origin of volcanoes. And there is similar sinew and interest to the pupils’ own evening discussions of politics, racism and sexism, to which Mercier often tolerantly listens.

Atlan shows that Suzanne’s own sense of self-worth is restored, not by suddenly being lucky in love, but in various events which show her in a not-so-flattering light. She successfully humiliates James with a nasty prank, she does very well in her college admissions – probably the best of the class – and is the intimate witness to Toni’s disillusion. Suzanne has a vivid sense, which Atlan conveys to the audience, that she is one of life’s winners after all. And this shifting sense of status is part of the mysterious darkness that is to engulf the story; it is overwhelmingly sad and sombre.

• La Gradiva screened at the Cannes film festival.