Teenage Camille (Samuel Kircher) knows neither weakness nor failure – and Valéry Carnoy’s debut feature Wild Foxes (La danse des renards, literally ‘the dance of the foxes’), co-written with Jacques Akchoti, captures this young man at his peak, before tracing his plummet. For here pride comes before a fall – but that fall, and its concomitant confrontation with mortality, form an essential part of Camille’s coming of age.
At a sports boarding school in the Ardennes, Camille is leader of the pack: the alpha in a small, tight group of boys who box. His fighting ability is beyond question, he shows real promise of winning the coming Euro championships and going on to be a contender on a global stage, and in recognition of his extraordinary talents, his coach Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Duran) and the school’s director Dr Blanchard (Yoann Blanc) bend over backwards to accommodate this golden boy’s needs and seem more than willing to give him whatever special treatment he requires. After all, a prodigy like Camille does not come along often.
The others in the school’s boxing team love Camille too – and none more than Matteo (Faycal Anaflous), who first introduced Camile to pugilism when the two were much younger, and who knows that he can no longer rival his childhood friend and is happy just to be his sparring partner, ‘coach’ and constant companion. “When you make it, I will make it,” Matteo reassures Camille, “It’s you and me, bruh. Since forever.”
The strong homosocial bonds of these tough male adolescents are matched by a certain cluelessness about women, even a casual misogyny. In the school canteen and in their locker rooms the boxers talk of different schoolgirls merely as objects, and boast and brag about their sexual successes with them no less than about their prowess in the ring – even if only the latter has much grounding in reality. These boys are immature, but nonetheless Camille is a ‘champion’ among them, and his life is following a prescribed trajectory from bout to bout and trophy to trophy. He is cocky, confident and full of certainties.
Yet Camille’s self-assurance is punctured as one simple slip changes everything. Although he is strong and resilient, although his injury heals fast and although the doctor gives him the all clear, the accident exposes Camille’s hitherto concealed vulnerability. This is overtly signified by a big scar now running down his arm – but the recurring phantom pain that comes with it seems related to a much smaller, but deeper scar that he has borne since childhood as a souvenir of domestic trauma and as the legacy of toxic masculinity that he has inherited and unwittingly maintains. Now Camille has become everything that he was taught by his estranged father to despise, and that his team mates resent and reject: frightened, pathetic, a loser. Yet even if Camille has internalised the model of his unseen father, he finds a second, rarther different father figure in the school’s gruff but tender janitor Boulers (Raphaël Thiéry). It is clear that Camille’s problems are psychological rather than physical – but though aware of this, he is not, for all his training, quite equipped to address what is in his head.
As Camille’s perceived weakness alienates him from his former friends, and even from Matteo, Camille is drawn, in his new-found isolation, to Yas (Anna Heckel), a Taekwondo student. She has her own scars – and although at first Camille’s interest in her is purely sexual, he quickly comes to admire and respect her as a person, for having a strength and determination that extend beyond her chosen sport. Yet crippled by new feelings of compassion, Camille struggles in the ring, not quite realising that doubt like his is part of the lessons that one learns in becoming an adult.
Wild Foxes is so-called because of the canine creatures that Camille and Matteo secretly feed in the woods adjacent to the school. Their act of nurturing and domestication, uncharacteristically feminine for such aggressive, hypermasculine teens, is also an act of transgression, literally taking them off the school premises and out of bounds – and it will have unexpected repercussions for the foxes that the boys are coaxing out of their defining wildness. This is an effective metaphor for Camille’s ephebic rites of passage – for the closer this top dog comes to humanity, the further he drifts from blindly accepting the paradigm of Darwinian domination that he has been pursuing, and the more he questions harming strangers in the ring. That conflict in Camille – a dancing duel between hard violence and a softer empathy – will prove the arena for this young, confused man’s growing pains. Carnoy has crafted an assured calling card whose naturalism conceals considerable subtlety, and whose uncertainties remain unresolved – but we suspect that this kid, for all his damage, will be alright.
strap: Valéry Carnoy’s nuanced feature debut sees a cocky teen boxing champion train hard and soft for a painful coming of age
© Anton Bitel
