BANG GANG (A MODERN LOVE STORY): "It's Brutal For This Generation," Says Director Eva Husson

Somewhat frighteningly, Eva Husson’s Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story is loosely based on a true story from 1996. During one particularly hot summer, a series of terrible accidents afflicted the French railways and a spate of teenage orgies really did take hold of a small, provincial French community. This explosive summer clearly piqued Husson’s creative impulses, and the film she created is now often being touted as a provocative erotica.

Let us not pigeon-hole Husson’s thought-provoking drama, though. Bang Gang’s beautifully controlled palette of seductive sunset pinks and blues definitely helps it achieve a classy artistic intimacy (in what could have been just a pornographic check-list of things teenagers probably get up to these days).

And a bit like Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, this film is importantly about the role that misspent youth has in shaping us all. So rather than ending in some kind of moralistic post-Code punishment, Husson’s movie is very much about showing how pushing the limits in this new age of Tinder and internet sex culture is often a defining part of many of our lives today.

ScreenAnarchycaught up with Husson to discuss this at the London Film Festival, and her film is now being distributed in UK cinemas by Metrodome Distribution. [It opens in the U.S. on Friday, June 17.]

ScreenAnarchy: I was wondering whether you had seen Larry Clark’s THE SMELL OF US, and whether you thought your film was comparable to it?

Eva Husson: No, I haven’t unfortunately. I made a point of not watching it, actually. I didn’t want to be influenced.

That’s interesting. So what do you make of the comparisons that have been made between your film and Larry Clark’s KIDS?

To be honest I was scared of this comparison at first, because I was worried that people would go into the film thinking that the relationships in it come from the same kind of rawness that it does in Kids. Or that they would think it would be filmed in the same sort of full-frontal way that Kids was.

But actually I’m taking it more as a sort of compliment now. I suppose, in terms of themes and the film’s ability to go back and explore extreme things from youth – even if I’m doing it twenty years later – I guess that kind of comparison is a positive one.

We also shouldn’t forget that at the time, Kids was extremely… valid. It was exploring that spectre of death which followed you if you were a teenager in the 90s. Basically, you wouldn’t have sex without a condom at that time, because you could catch AIDs and die from making love. That really was such a big part of who we were. I mean, I was nineteen when I first saw Kids, and it felt like the film of a generation for me.

So how did this influence you?

I guess it really made me try to think in about what it means to kids today to make love. I think for them it means something very different now. I mean, if something goes wrong, they don’t even have to care, because they always have a second chance - there are so many effective treatments now.

I think I also had to think a lot about young people’s relationship to drugs now, because they seem a lot more accessible now to me. I get the impression that they’re even more mainstream now than they were twenty years ago.

When Larry Clark presented THE SMELL OF US at the Venice Film Festival, he said he had finally managed to capture those kinds of changes in French youth today. But I actually don’t think he did at all. So I was wondering whether you thought you had managed it?

Erm… Well, I would say that my film is a very extreme version of reality. And it’s a version of reality that 99% of young people in France won’t recognise. However, that’s why it was interesting to me. I thought it would be very intriguing to explore something that intense, that extreme.

I wanted to talk about adolescence and how things can go so far during that time. The way that, you know, all those kinds of things build your identity as an adult. It was that process that I was really interested in.

What do you think made you so interested in this?

Well, I suppose it had to do with the fact I originally came from quite a small town, called Le Havre, in Normandie. When I grew up there we were very bored and middle-class – you know, not specifically drawn to anything in particular. So when I read the news article about this story, I thought “Shit! That could have happened to us!” I immediately began to wonder how you could go from being a very middle-class, average kid, to that.

I mean, I did have quite an intense adolescence but, you know, there wasn’t any collective sex! I did a lot of drugs, explored a lot of things, and travelled a lot – but no orgies. So I was curious how that leap might happen. But I also think doing all these things hasn’t made me a more unstable adult, or you know, a more damaged adult. So that was also something I wanted to explore in this case.

I think a lot of time, when you get a picture about intense youth, the kids almost always get really damaged, or die or stuff like that. I don’t believe in that at all. I think pretty much everybody I know who had those kinds of experiences came out… err… saner, you know?  Okay they went really far, found their limits (because they didn’t know the limits), but then they were better for it. It was just an exploration of the limits.

But why do you think you’re so specifically drawn to stories about adolescence?

I think that probably has to do with the fact that I was a teenager until I was about thirty-five. [Laughs.] But I think I’m also always just using youth as a starting point. I think Bang Gang had a lot to do with observing the general decadence of society.

You might talk about it in terms of this kind of French aristocratic tradition, but for me it’s much more about the middle classes and decadence of democracy. I think we’re all so bored in our current democracies that these are the only limits that we can push. But yeah, so many of these limits have already been pushed, so pushing them now doesn’t even really have the same kind of relevance.

I think once I got past that, I still realised that there’s lots of things that are happening in the world now, and I thought it would be interesting to see how these kinds of changes affect us.

Like exploring the impact of pornography on young people?

Honestly? …I couldn’t care less. Porn is just part of the story, because you can’t talk about youth nowadays without talking about porn. So I did my homework. [Laughs.] I really mean that too. [Giggles.] It was very tedious at times actually, but you have to just, erm… face it?

I honestly don’t envy young people now. When I was a teenager, the first time I saw a penis was in a magazine. And it was far away and I could just close it. I didn’t then really come across another one until later in life.

Now, I think when you’re ten or even seven or eight, these kinds of images are just thrown at you – and you’re not mature enough to deal with it at that age, I think. I think that the movie deals with that too: Adolescents who don’t necessarily have the tools to cope yet. My characters go too far, and they have to adjust as a result. They have to adapt to what’s thrown at them, and this generation has to do that a lot, I think.

So you think digital culture is having a negative impact on young people today?

I don’t know, but one thing I did notice is that young people now have a very different relationship to the image or the self-image – to these kinds of representations of themselves. Young people now are always representing themselves as being cool or really great, and balancing this kind of image is really not that easy a thing to deal with. Especially when you’re growing up, as it’s already a really hard time.

It’s a hard enough task as it is just to grow up. So if on top of that you have a social context that is extremely hard to deal with, well then I guess you’re bound to have some moments that are explosive.

So do you think BANG GANG taps into the Zeitgeist of the current generation?

Well, in terms of modern times, I do think we are in the middle of a revolution. Kids now have all these new tools, and it’s like the printing revolution of the Gutenberg Press, you know? But it’s also just different, and people are just having to start learn the limits again.

I honestly just think it’s brutal for this generation, because they’re the ones having to negotiate this new territory.  I think that’s why the “modern” element in my subtitle “A Modern Love Story” is so important. I mean, the original news article is from 1996, so the story is actually not that new, but I thought the modern element – of social media – was going to be so present for kids.

Actually, I have a friend who worked on this film, and she recently told me that her 14-year old daughter (who lives in Paris) had had a similar experience at, erm… I don’t know, how do you call it… middle school? She’s 14, and they had a very similar game. This game had a name, and you know, the girls involved felt like they should really go for it – because otherwise they were excluded.

This girl showed her mother all the pictures, and it was insane because my friend was saying how suddenly she had all these images from the film right in front of her. Except they were real and on Instagram. She couldn’t believe it, because she thought that we had gone really far with this film, but in reality this film is exactly sort of thing that can happen now.