On-screen chemistry is a curiously unpredictable commodity. In theory, you should just be able to put two attractive people together in a frame and watch the sparks fly. But mutual attractiveness alone is not enough to guarantee that unmistakable fizz and crackle that elevates a cinema romance. When a director casts right, however, the result can be incendiary. Think Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Richard Gere and Debra Winger, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.
When the director of Grand Central, Rebecca Zlotowski, recruited two of the most sought-after young actors in France – Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) and Léa Seydoux (Blue Is The Warmest Color) – she must have hoped that they would at least smoulder together on screen. She has said: "I knew that I would be creating a couple that people in France wanted to see kissing each other." What she gets is a fusion as explosive as anything going on in the nuclear power plant that makes the rumbling, ominous backdrop to the story. The co-stars make an uncannily attractive pair: Rahim as unskilled power plant new recruit Gary; and Seydoux playing Karole, the fiancé of a co-worker.
Their first meeting is a screen-melting kiss. Nuclear power plant newbie Gary is having the risks of the job explained to him – the "dose" of radiation that is a day-to-day risk for decontamination workers such as him. Karole saunters over, a lissome-limbed vision in denim hot pants, and unexpectedly plants a lingering kiss on Gary's lips. "You see?" she murmurs. "You felt everything then. Fear, worry, blurred vision, dizziness, shaky legs. That's the dose. That's what it does." She walks away, and then adds, "and that was only a low dose". Their second encounter is, if anything, even more intense. Squeezed together in the back seat of a truck, his hand brushes against her bare thigh. While the other passengers in the car laugh and joke, Gary and Karole are serious and still, focused only on the touch of skin against skin. The next shot is inevitable: the pair embark on an illicit affair.
The fitting backdrop heightens the intensity of this romance. Zlotowski said she felt the idea of "contamination and radiation" would work well with the story of forbidden love that she wanted to tell. Because of the dangers associated with working in a nuclear factory, trust in fellow workers to do their jobs, to realise the consequences of each and every action, is paramount. By betraying that trust, Gary and Karole realise that they are poisoning the precarious working environment. But by this point, their romantic entanglement has reached the point of no return.
Zlotowski introduces us to the closed camaraderie of this world, which she researched for a year, with a meticulous, almost documentary-style attention to detail. She establishes the rules and risks of the job; the atmosphere of wild-west fearlessness that unites the men after work, having survived another day (the presence of a mechanical bucking bronco in the bar where they all drink is no accident). The workers, clad in layers of protective gear, inhabit a blue-tinged netherworld, walking a path close to death every day.
The fact that the two central characters don't actually meet until 25 minutes into the story is a brilliantly restrained piece of story-telling: the risks of the world are established and stakes are high.
Although Zlotowski says her film is partly inspired by B movies and the wide-open landscapes of America, the influences of her home country are evident: the film has an eye for the details of the working environment that is reminiscent of Laurent Cantet's The Class or Human Resources. It inhabits the sweat-stained macho environment of the power plant as comfortably as Jacques Audiard's A Prophet did the prison world.
Grand Central doesn't just introduce us to a captivating onscreen couple, it shows us a directorial talent to be reckoned with.
Grand Central is released nationwide 18 July.
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