ASTRAKAN

The reassurance implicit in the coming-ofage story is that of things foregone, universal, known; the particularities of the passage are shorn of their severity and exigence. The subject is supposed, invariably, to have arrived, their journey ultimately delineated in retrospect. The entropy of heightened subjectivity is at last externalized and made legible. The liminality of adolescence, that fount of narrative momentum by which childhood experience becomes patently familiar or perversely exotic, either nostalgic or novel, loses some of its jagged, inscrutable essence in such conventional limning. David Depesseville’s Astrakan would appear, on paper, to typify the genre: 12-year-old orphan Samuel (Mirko Giannini) tries adapting to rural life with his new foster family, their investment in the child more transactional than emotional due to France’s historically subsidized proviso for adoption in…