In spring 1996, a young teenage boy went to see a local nurse with embarrassing symptoms. He was a resident of Conyers, a quiet upper-middle-class town in a slice of all-American suburban Atlanta. Holly Hunter grew up there. The nurse asked the boy about his sexual history. What he told her suggested widespread local promiscuity. More teens were brought in, more syphilis cases were diagnosed, and the lid was lifted on a year’s worth of drink- and drug-fuelled sex parties, held at the homes of oblivious, absent parents. Around 250 youngsters were involved, some aged just 12, some who had racked up as many as 100 sexual partners.
“I thought: ‘That’s just crazy, how did they end up like this?’” says Eva Husson, a 39-year-old French director. “On top of that, though, I could relate to being a really bored teenager in her hometown [Husson is from Le Havre, in Normandy]. I wanted to get out of there, I was doing drugs with my friends. And when I heard that story I thought: ‘We could have done that.’ But we didn’t. So, what happened? How do you go from being regular teenage kids, who are just bored, to that?”
The result of Husson’s curiosity is her feature debut Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), which uses a similar scenario to explore what it means to be a confused teenager, searching for genuine intimacy in the midst of mindless sex. Filmed in Biarritz, Husson restricts the action to about 50 kids, focusing on a handful of them.
With cocky Alex’s (Finnegan Oldfield) parents away for the summer, a party turns into a game of spin the bottle, which turns into sex, which turns into more sex, and more sex, much of it documented on phone cameras. But although there is a lot of nudity in the film, the sex is something of a red herring – Bang Gang is a tender ode to adolescence, a dreamlike meditation that has nothing but respect for every kid in the picture.
Husson herself was a lost child. “Oh my god, I was so fucking lonely, I was the loneliest thing on Earth,” she says, over a drink in a cafe near her home in north-east Paris. She is part of the furniture here and thought it would be quiet, so apologises more than once for the banging eurotechno the staff have decided to pump out all afternoon. “I’m not embarrassed, I’m angry!” she laughs as the walls shake. “This is horrible music.”
She laughs a lot – a lot more than she used to. “I was extremely awkward, socially,” she continues. “As a kid, I just had no idea how to relate to people. No clue.” Work had brought her parents – both teachers – to Normandy, and Husson wanted to leave from the age of 12. “I didn’t really have friends until I was 15. I would just spend hours reading books and devouring TV. It started to get better when I started taking drugs.” In 1992, with a DJ boyfriend, Husson began partying, taking ecstasy at raves, spending summers on Ibizan nudist beaches, feeling “free about the world, drugs and a lot of stuff”.
All of this feeds into Bang Gang, which is about trying to fit in, to discover who you are and what you might want. “This movie is about groups of teenagers feeling so tight and so comfortable with one another, and I was always like: ‘I don’t know what that feels like,’” says Husson. “I was always the one trying to fit into a group that didn’t want me. I wish I had seen movies like this when I was a teenager because it would have made me feel a bit more normal. I was trying to go for that – to talk about these kids who are just not quite there yet, in their minds.”
Bang Gang is what the kids call their carnal collective. The title, says Husson, is not meant to be provocative – and I wonder if it is less so in France, which has always seemed so sexually liberated. “I think teenagers fuck everywhere,” she says, dismissively. “I lived in Puerto Rico for two years and they had the highest rate in the world of underage pregnancies. Why? Because it was a very Catholic, repressive society where teenagers were not allowed to have sex, but that’s what teenagers do – and if they don’t have proper context regarding education, they just do it in the worst way possible. And, if I’m not mistaken, England is not far away in terms of underage pregnancies.”
Besides, Husson says, Bang Gang didn’t get a free ride in France. “We have a lot of people who are extremely conservative here. The movie’s certificate was attacked by a Catholic association in France.” Traditionalist group Promouvoir (or “Promote”), who got Lars von Trier’s Antichrist banned, attempted to get Bang Gang rated 18. They failed, and it was passed as PG12. In the UK, though, it is 18, excluding a younger teen audience.
“Yes,” says Husson. “And 15- and 16-year-old French kids who watch the film actually send me a lot of messages on Facebook thanking me, saying: ‘Thank god someone is portraying our sexuality the way it’s happening.’ And I’m not saying all kids behave like that. But it does reflect some reality.”
Much of this appreciation may also be because Bang Gang avoids melodrama, forsaking formulaic resolutions for mature character development – it’s an affectionate, non-judgmental film. When one of the girls, George (Marilyn Lima, previously a non-actor who was cast after Husson saw photos of her on Tumblr), becomes the subject of a public shaming, there is no big fallout, no heartache, as there might be in blunter films “usually written by a man,” says Husson).
Instead, George takes it on the chin. The humiliation doesn’t happen. “Because she refuses to be that girl. I really wanted her to act like that, because I’ve seen a lot of women behave like her and, for some reason, it’s just not represented in storytelling. I think it’s extremely important to give the other side of the story, which is that not every woman sees herself as a fucking victim all the time. It’s possible to refuse that representation of yourself. I really wanted to empower her.”
There has indeed been gratitude for the fact that Bang Gang, which is chiefly a female story, was written and directed by a woman. Husson left home at 17, moved to Paris and gained an master’s in English literature before achieving a master’s in fine arts at LA’s American Film Institute.
After that, she made short films and music videos, and has said it has taken her until now to get a feature off the ground because the industry doesn’t take female directors as seriously as men. Bang Gang, she says, “wouldn’t have been made by a guy”. Not in the same form, anyway.
Her female actors told her they wouldn’t have done it for a male director, wary of the “potential voyeurism that a man could bring to a project like this. And I think even the guys – I gave them roles that they usually don’t get. Alex, yes, he’s a womaniser, but he’s also a lost kid. And he understands that at some point. It’s not all black and white, he’s not just the asshole.”
Bang Gang celebrates youth in its clumsy glory, mistakes and all. It’s a pretty, poetic film, with a literary heart; Carl Jung and Miguel de Cervantes are namechecked, betraying the young Husson’s bookish background. Ultimately, the film’s message is that you will find a way through.
“That was actually extremely important to me,” says Husson. “Movies about teenagers always end up as tragedies, their lives completely over, and it’s a fucking lie. When you’re 17, you will bounce back. Unless you’re dead. Life is hard on everybody, and shit happens. And it’s OK. That’s what people do in life – you bounce back. Not many people actually give up. And I think that’s what makes us human and beautiful.”
• Bang Gang is released in the UK on 17 June
