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The figure of the Gradiva (Latin for “she who walks”) haunted 20th-century art, from author Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy to Sigmund Freud’s seminal psychoanalytic interpretation of that novella, to the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dalí, André Masson, and André Breton, to the erotic musings of Nouveau Roman writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. The original Neo-Attic bas-relief resides in the Vatican and is itself a copy of a Greek original dating to the 4th century BCE. Marine Atlan internalizes this art history in her graceful and sophisticated debut feature, La Gradiva—winner of the Grand Prize during Critics Week at Cannes. The film follows a group of French teenagers on a field trip to Naples and Pompeii. An acclaimed cinematographer, Atlan has a practiced eye for photographing the city, presenting its sun-dappled beauty, its mundanity, and its instability simultaneously. The region and its mythology provide a rich backdrop for the simmering angst and romantic entanglements the group brings to this radiant seaside setting most famous for catastrophes and pizza: the ambiguous friendship between classmates Toni and James, Toni’s parallel search for traces of his family history in the region, the futile efforts of harried teacher Mercier to cut through her students’ all-consuming ambivalence, and perceptive tertiary characters nurturing their own private ennui. ~OO