Year:2024

Runtime: 103 minutes

Written and directed by: Agathe Riedinger

Starring: Malou Khebizi, Andréa Bescond, Ashley Romano, Kilia Fernane, Léa Gorla, Alexandra Noisier, Idir Azougli

By Sarah Manvel

Liane (Malou Khebizi) is nineteen and the most determined woman you’ve ever met. This is largely because her home situation is pretty depressing; after some years in foster care, she’s back living with her nasty mother Sabine (Andréa Bescond) and her beloved younger sister Alicia (Ashley Romano) on the wrong side of a resort town in the south of France, but Liane is not going to be stuck there for long. She has beauty, brains and one goal, to be selected for a reality TV show. She is going to make something of herself, and everyone is going to see and appreciate the real her. Whether or not she’ll succeed is the question at the heart of “Wild Diamond,” a movie as modern as it is kind, and which due to its kindness could only have been made by a woman. In her first film, writer-director Agathe Riedinger never sneers at Liane’s ambitions while never forgetting how cruel the world can be to beautiful young women. The combination of beauty and talent on display here is very good indeed.

Liane has three best friends, Stéphanie (Kilia Fernane), Carla (Léa Gorla) and Jessy (Alexandra Noisier), two of whom are already mothers and the third manages a nail salon. Liane could work a regular job if she wanted – she paid for her boob job by waitressing – but right now she’s focused on building her Instagram from its minor 10,000 followers to enough to be selected for the show. If chosen Liane would be paid the magnificent sum of €120 ($130) a day, and much more importantly would immediately be an influencer, able to charge huge rates for her TikTok and Instagram posts. And if she does well on the show? Modelling, acting, who knows. It’s all a business, and Liane repeatedly reminds everybody that beauty gives you power, having power means you get money, and money is all you really need.

Her social media fame is strong enough there’s graffiti in the streets about her, men DM her videos of themselves masturbating, and occasionally enthusiastic young men follow her on their motorbikes. One of the bike guys is Dino (Idir Azougli), who realises they were in a foster home together, and to whom Liane finds herself drawn despite herself. Dino works desperately hard to impress her, with his dreams of home ownership and his work ethic as a mechanic. The empty spaces in which they hang out include an abandoned waterpark, a superb metaphor. The problem is that for Liane, dreams of a steady job and a nice house are too small. On a drunken night out she tells her sweet and supportive friends, who cheered when she paid cash for a designer dress, that their responsibilities have turned them into slaves. To Dino, who doesn’t know that she’s a virgin, she says nothing at all. It’s not that she doesn’t like him. But her beauty is a business, and her body is to serve the business, not some nice boy’s pleasure. Her dreams are more important to her than even the nicest boy. 

The main relationship Liane has is not even the one with her beloved younger sister; it’s with social media, whether watching other influencers’ reels, working on her posts, or adding up all the comments to understand how she should be feeling. Special notice must be given to Rachèle Raoult’s costumes, Julia Didier‘s makeup and Delpine Giraud‘s hair, who all understand precisely how Liane is using her physicality within the limits of her budget. Her manicures are a thing of beauty, too. Cinematographer Noé Bach films Liane’s body with complete respect and the music, largely French hip-hop or club bops, adds a pulsing urgency.

Ms Riedinger also gives Liane a clever personal quirk: she likes to smell things. The sequence in the designer shop shows her sniffing the purses and shoes as she chats with her friends. When she has something nice at home she tends to put it to her nose before she does anything else with it. That leads to something incredibly clever in the movie’s only scene of danger, where, when smell comes into it, Liane makes a risky but important decision. What’s also notable is that the men Liane meets, even the vile one on the train in the opening sequence, are never physically threatening. In groups the men proactively de-escalate each other when they see she’s nervous or frightened. In both British and American cultures groups of men in those setups would be egging each other on and taking pleasure in scaring her, so it’s marvellous to see how easily a culture can make the opposite possible. 

Ms Khebizi, who was found in an open casting call and visibly struggling not to cry at the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, is astounding as Liane, walking everywhere in six-inch heels and enabling the shifting sands of her emotions to play out over her face. Mr Azougli, who resembles Tom Hardy, is equally good as the decent young man who can hardly believe his luck. The ambitions of young working class women are so rarely taken seriously that “Wild Diamond” would be a delight even if it wasn’t as good as it is. The fact it is – well, we should all be so acclaimed for being exactly what we are.