The Crusade (Louis Garrel, 2021)

The Crusade is the final cinematic project of Jean-Claude Carrière, which is both odd and poignant. He co-wrote this featurette with Garrel, and especially when you consider some of the masterworks Carrière has been involved with, this really is a minor-key trifle. And yet, it's such a blatantly goodhearted and optimistic film. So maybe it's instructive for all of us that the man who made his reputation scripting some of Buñuel's most scathing satires is going out with the sappiest message imaginable: "I believe the children are our future."

Featured in Cannes' "Cinema for the Climate" sidebar -- itself a sign of our fragile times -- The Crusade is focused on an unhappy bourgeois couple (Garrel and Laetitia Casta) whose self-absorption is interrupted by the discovery that their young son (Joseph Engel) is selling off their prized possessions to fund some secret hobby. Is he on drugs? (No.) Is he out having sex? (Well, yes. But that's incidental.) No, in fact he is part of an underground organization of children from around the world. They've had virtual conferences, they've secured funding from a few NGOs, and they are prepared to put their plan into action. They will stave off global catastrophe by implementing a massive engineering project that will create an artificial sea in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

One of the things that bothers so many conservatives about Greta Thunberg is that she calls out the world's adults, arguing that we have a responsibility to future generations. Conservatives, of course, maintain that no one owes anybody anything, not even our children. With that in mind, The Crusade proposes that kids give up on the adults and wrest control of the planet away from those of us who aren't going to be stuck on it for that much longer. It's a fantasy, of course, but Garrel and Carrière present the concept with no irony, suggesting that the film is, in some respects, a dying man's last wish. In dreams begin responsibilities.