“Only beautiful people succeed,” says the prickly teenage TikTok queen at the heart of Agathe Reidinger’s emotionally raw coming-of-age drama Wild Diamond. Pinning all her hopes on this depressing credo, volatile working-class firecracker Liane (Malou Khebizi) mobilises every weapon in her meagre armoury in a bid to escape her straitjacket life of petty crime, deadbeat boyfriends and low-wage jobs, from breast enlargement to hair extension, pumped-up lips to thickly painted fake eyebrows, with silicone butt implants already in her sights. An aspiring online influencer growing up in a poor single-parent family in the coastal town of Fréjus, Liane has an audacious escape plan: to become “the French Kim Kardashian.”
The only debut feature selected for this year’s Cannes competition, one of just four directed by women, Wild Diamond is an impressive showcase for its 19-year-old novice star Khebizi, a magnetically sulky non-professional who Reidinger discovered in a street casting. Lusty and pugnacious, with a spicy script full of slang words and F-bombs, it certainly packs an energetic punch. But as an overall cinematic package, it falls short of greatness. The freewheeling narrative is a little too diffuse, and too reliant on familiar tropes about damaged teens seeking public validation to heal private wounds, looking for love in all the wrong places. In this sense it touches on well-trodden cinematic terrain, with echoes of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014), Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex (2023) and more.
Wild Diamond expands Reidinger’s César-nominated 2018 short Waiting For Jupiter, which starred Sarah-Megan Allouch as the first incarnation of Liane. Both films cast a scathing eye on the exploitative, voyeuristic, misogyny-magnifying nature of social media celebrity. Reidinger uses Liane to explore the extreme pressures weighing on adolescent girls in the age of TikTok and Instagram, forever being objectified and hypersexualised, not only by needy boys and predatory men, but often by themselves and their female peers too.
The key dramatic hook in Wild Diamond is Liane’s application for a place in a tacky reality TV show, Miracle Island, which she feels sure will catapult her to lucrative celebrity status. Her audition scene is a masterclass in creepy subtext, framing Liane in a slow-motion zoom shot while an off-screen casting director cynically probes her potential willingness to have sex, pick fights and fabricate gossipy scandal on screen.
This very modern brand of post-Warholioan digital fame is a much-debated cultural phenomenon, and Wild Diamond adds nothing especially new or insightful to the discourse. That said, Reidinger does display a rare degree of empathy and understanding towards young women who pursue this kind of tabloid celebrity. In Liane’s mind, if she lands the Miracle Island job, it will finally prove she has value to her bitchy gang of small-town party-girl friends and the scathing, semi-estranged mother who once abandoned her to a foster home.
Wild Diamond presents Liane’s mission as a kind of spiritual quest, an ascent into paradise, heavily alluded when she gatecrashes a fashion shoot in the Eden-like gardens of a luxury mansion. Her ambitions may seem pathologically shallow on face value, but not without their own inspirational logic and inner beauty. It also emerges that Liane is a virgin, reinforcing this quasi-Biblical theme, and highlighting the irony of her performative nymphette image for the male gaze online. A more traditional social-realist drama would have ended on a soul-crushing condemnation of reality TV’s hollow consumerist promise, but Reidinger opts for something more subtle, ambivalent and potentially even hopeful.
Reidinger has an art school background, which may explain some of her more striking aesthetic choices in Wild Diamond. Her avowed love of “bad taste” informs the film’s stylised Grunge Barbie look, a visual riot of saturated colours, neon-drenched nightclubs and shabby shopping malls. Her most inspired motif collects messages posted on Liane’s social media accounts and pastes them across the screen in monumental blocks of text, a pleasingly old-school Godardian flourish in this digital age.
Laine’s online reactions run the full emotional spectrum, from declarations of love and devotional worship to toxic sexist leering and the inevitable rape threats. She loves them all, even the brutal ones. “Bad buzz is buzz,” she shrugs. Audrey Ismaël’s lyrical, ruminative cello score adds pleasing tonal depth and contrast to a background soundtrack of high-energy rap and dance-pop. All these interesting choices suggest Reidinger will go on to make richer, stronger films than this ambitious but flawed debut.
Director, screenwriter: Agathe Riedinger
Cast: Malou Khebizi, Idir Azougli, Andréa Bescond, Ashley Romano, Alexis Manenti, Kilia Fernane, Léa Gorla, Alexandra Noisier, Antonia Buresi
Producers: Priscilla Bertin, Judith Nora
Cinematography: Noé Bach
Editing: Lila Desiles
Production design: Astrid Tonellier
Music: Audrey Ismaël
Production company: Silex Films (France)
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
103 minutes
