Two boys on a suburban train to Paris, with the promise of a Saturday night ahead of them: Victor and Rainer want to go to a club, want to drink, dance, make out, and get lost in the intoxication of a big party. But right from the start, a deep melancholy stands in the way of this plan. It can be seen in the images of the city lit up at night as well as in the faces of the boys - whose mouths talk about one thing while their eyes talk about something else.
With L'âge atomique, the first part of a planned trilogy about “youth”, Héléna Klotz - born in Paris in 1979 and raised in the banlieus - presents a remarkable feature film debut, both in terms of its formal ambition and its narrative sensitivity. Sound, image and emotion drift apart in an elegant and at the same time unwieldy way, something that cannot quite be named spreads out in the open spaces. But it is familiar to anyone who remembers the disturbances of growing up. At the club, Victor gets one rejection after another from the girls and Rainer feels the hurt first hand. A little later, the two get into an argument with rich snobs; a highly complex exchange of words leads to a simple brawl. As in Bresson's films, the contrast between the minimalist staging style and the emphatic truthfulness of the scene creates an irritating excess of meaning in Klotz's work.
