Louis Garrel’s The Crusade, presented at the 2021 Jerusalem Film Festival, succeeds in its premise and approach but falls short in execution.
From August 24th to September 4th, the Jerusalem Film Festival is presenting an impressive selection of titles, who have been successful on the film festival circuit, including Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili), The Worst Person In The World (Joachim Trier), The Braves (Anaïs Volpé), The Divide (Catherine Corsini), or Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre, Julie Lecoustre), to name but a few. Among them is The Crusade (original title: La Croisade), a feature film by French actor and director Louis Garrel, which premiered at the 74th Cannes Film Festival.
The most compelling part of The Crusade is its first fifteen minutes. We meet Abel (Louis Garrel), Marianne (Laetitia Casta), and their teenage son Joseph (Joseph Engel) in their posh Parisian flat. When Abel and Marianne realize some valuable items of theirs are missing, they turn to their son with suspicion. It is clear that Joseph is harboring a secret. The parents search frantically throughout their apartment and discover many expensive items missing, including rare books, family heirlooms, and flashy watches. Joseph soon confesses to having sold all of it. “You have one left,” Joseph exclaims about the watches, to his furious father. “They all tell the same time.”
The Crusade’s opening is fast-paced, amusing, and humorous (see the trailer below). It is full of undeniable energy and witty dialogue, with rapid camera movements to match. The theater filled with chuckles each time Abel and Marianne notice another costly item of theirs gone, followed by Joseph’s comical disregard of his parents’ dismay. It comes to light that Joseph has sold the precious belongings to help fund a top-secret youth-led ecological project in the Sahara with an ambitious goal: to save the planet.
The remainder of the film explores various themes and topics, including climate change, generational differences, marriage problems, racial profiling, and young love, to name a few. However, save for the first two – climate change and generational differences – the film glances over them. It does not give adequate time to these topics, which begs the question: if a film is not going to dedicate the time to a topic that it deserves, is it worth including at all? Are some issues too weighty to be a secondary topic? Is it inappropriate to weave them into the story tangentially? I do not have the answer to this, but I can say that the ways in which The Crusade quickly skates over scenes dealing with these topics, feels more disrespectful than anything else.
It is important for me to say that the issue I find with these secondary topics is not the overall tone of the film, but rather the quantity of time, or lack thereof, they are given. In a film that is just over an hour, especially a film that spans the continents, every moment counts and extra elements must be handled with care.
After The Crusade’s premiere at Cannes 2021, some critics took issue with the levity and oversimplification used in the film’s approach to the environmental disaster we’ve created for ourselves. Even as we approach the point of no return, I disagree with this mentality. I believe the only way we will not only survive but overcome obstacles facing humanity is with a combination of seriousness and lightheartedness, and everything in between. There is room for a range of tones, as long as it is handled mindfully. Not every film can be An Inonvenient Truth, nor should it be. So I commend The Crusade’s premise and approach, even if the execution was less than perfect. It was good enough.
