Author's judgement: 3/5
Six teenagers in a prestigious French high school: a modern, rich, very intelligent pack that hides a great mystery. This is the plot of The last hour, the film of the week just released in theaters, signed by Sebastien Marnier and presented at the recent Venice Film Festival where it was received with some interest. It is a story that is very, perhaps too close to the themes and problems that every day we know belong to young people in most industrialized countries. There is talk of collective aggression, of social behavior often inspired by violence, in search of a dimension and an identity that they cannot find in the "normality" of a school, a family.
The story begins with a professor committing suicide during class in a class of particularly intelligent students. A substitute is called to replace him who immediately senses a hostile, distrustful climate, hostile to any attempt at dialogue. The professor senses that in class a very cohesive group of 6 boys was formed among them manifesting strange attitudes. Partly because he is provoked and partly intrigued, he discovers that the group is "training" in practices of extreme self-harm but the meaning is not clear, the real reason that pushes them towards a direction of detachment and opposition with the rest of the school and their world. It should be noted that there is no family figure on their horizon, a parent never appears. At one point, almost by chance, the professor comes to discover a box buried in a quarry where the boys keep a series of DVDs in great secrecy.
He manages to take them and view them and finds a "collection" of harsh, bad, violent, dramatic images that could well summarize all the possible evil of the modern era: from the great nuclear disasters to the attack on the Twin Towers, from the polluted oceans to the slaughterhouses of animals. They constitute the essence of the so-called "civilization of images" in which we live totally immersed. The boys are subjugated by those visions and it is likely that they are disturbed beyond normality. Perhaps, also because of their above-average intelligence which allows them to see and perceive a picture otherwise unclear to the majority of their peers. The professor begins to understand that behind their anomalous behavior there is a plan (which obviously we will not reveal) and tries to intervene.
Let's say right away that it is a film that travels on two parallel tracks: the first of absolute "modernity" and contemporaneity and refers to the theme of the "herd" although, in this case, anomalous because it is made up of rich, cultured, intelligent and not from "savages" as it often happens to read in more or less daily news events. Another theme with a very strong impact can be traced back to the era of filming always, everything and in any case, with a mobile phone or a mini camera. Also in this sense The last hour takes us back to the “civilization of images”. The second track refers very much to a narrative that has an important success at least on the small screen and concerns a genre between thriller and existential drama. The film lends itself to multiple interpretations and, for each of them, has its own solidity and narrative interest. For an "off-season" film from France that has rarely given interesting titles in this genre, it is well worth the ticket.
