Red Rocks (Les Roches Rouges, 2026) – Review

Children of the Red Rocks

by Chris Montanelli

Bruno Dumont’s new film opens with a boy climbing onto a scooter he cannot possibly drive, next to a girl who cannot drive it either, on their way to jump off a cliff that’s illegal to jump from. Nobody in Les Roches Rouges is going to explain any of this to you, because nobody in the film is old enough to explain it to themselves, and that turns out to be the entire method. Dumont has cast six children, none of them older than eight, as the whole of his cast, reserved the few adult roles for background presences trailing enormous dogs, and shot the thing in four weeks because that’s roughly how long five-year-olds can be trusted in front of a camera before exhaustion sets in. It sounds like a stunt. It plays like one of the more radical things at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, and one of the gentlest.

The setup, such as it is, could fit on an index card: a handful of children spend a Côte d’Azur summer diving from red cliffs into blue water, riding scooters they can barely reach the pedals of, meeting under a rail bridge because that’s where the shade is. Géo, five years old, blond, filthy, comes trailing an easy physical affection with a girl named Manon, the kind of unselfconscious cuddling that adults have long since had trained out of them. Then Eve shows up — red-haired, already “taken” by a boy named B, and immediately, calculatedly interested in Géo instead — and the film’s real subject arrives with her: not romance, but the machinery of wanting something because somebody else already has it. Two boys start circling each other over a girl who is quite pleased to have arranged the circling herself. It is, at bottom, a rigorously Girardian little melodrama about mimetic desire, acted out by children too young to know that’s what they’re doing, which may be the only way to see the mechanism this nakedly. Adults perform their triangles with alibis. These six don’t have any yet.

Dumont shoots all of it with a handheld camera that seems to be chasing the children rather than composing them, because it is: there’s essentially no script to speak of, dialogue reduced to the kind of thing five-year-olds actually say to each other (“Let’s go over there!”), and a director who has apparently decided that the single greatest resource available to him is a child’s total inability to perform for an audience. This isn’t cute-kid filmmaking, and it isn’t Dumont doing whimsy; it’s the same interest in pre-psychological states of being that’s animated his work since he first started treating the camera as an instrument for catching a person before their interior life calcifies into character. Somewhere between P’tit Quinquin and the extraordinary Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc, his Joan of Arc musical, Dumont arrived at the idea that childhood is one of the last places cinema can still locate something like grace — not religious grace exactly, but a kind of pure, unsaturated action, behavior that hasn’t yet been narrated into motive. Géo stumbling clumsily off his scooter in front of the girl he’s trying to impress isn’t a directed beat. It’s just a five-year-old’s body doing what a five-year-old’s body does, and Dumont’s whole aesthetic here is a bet that this is more interesting than anything a trained actor could stage to resemble it.

That said, the film is not as innocent about class as it is about desire, and its sharpest move is to let the money show up almost silently. Eve is the only one of the six whose family we actually meet: a mother with a gorgeous villa, a grandfather rotting pleasantly in a decayed noble estate across the Italian border in Ventimiglia, tennis lessons the old man insists on taking while several enormous dogs wreck his concentration. The dogs recur meaningfully — three of them at the grandfather’s house, one at the mother’s — and Dumont seems to be using the animals as a kind of stand-in for whatever’s left of instinct in adults who’ve otherwise been fully processed by psychology and property. Géo, by contrast, is never once shown with a parent or a house; he simply exists, feral and expressive, a child summer’s answer to a fifties teenage rebel, all ripped tank top and unrepentant swagger with nowhere in particular he’s from. The film draws its class line so lightly you could miss it, but it’s there in every dog, every villa shot, every unbothered scooter Géo climbs onto that clearly belongs to nobody’s actual garage.

The border crossing that eventually sends Eve and Géo from France into Italy by train is the closest the film comes to a plot event, and it functions less as travel than as threshold — one of several lines this movie is quietly obsessed with, the other being the ledge of the rocks themselves, the boundary between air and water that these children spend the entire summer throwing themselves across. Between the cliffs, the sea, and the wind, Dumont is working with something close to a presocratic elemental palette; the only classical element missing is fire, unless you count the rust-red stone the whole film is named for, which does the job of suggesting appetite and danger without anyone needing to strike a match. It’s a schematic way to build a film, water and rock and a girl in a yellow swimsuit standing in for the whole architecture of human wanting, and it would be unbearably pretentious if it weren’t executed with this much patience and this little insistence. Dumont isn’t asking you to decode a metaphor. He’s asking you to watch six children be entirely, physically present, and to notice, almost despite yourself, how much of adult desire’s basic shape is already sitting there in a five-year-old’s jealousy over a girl who’s just told him she likes him better than the other boy.

Whether Les Roches Rouges adds up to more than its own methodology is a fair question, and one this film seems entirely uninterested in answering for you. It has no arc in the conventional sense, no resolution to the triangle beyond the fact that childhood triangles don’t actually resolve, they just get outgrown. What it offers instead is close to forty years of a director’s stubborn, singular curiosity about what a camera can catch before a person learns to perform themselves for it, applied here to the last possible subjects innocent enough to make the experiment work. It is a small film about an enormous, familiar problem — how wanting things is never really about the thing — filtered through six people too young to have built any defenses against being watched. That may be the most honest access to the subject cinema has left.