Once seen as a symbol of the French Communist Party’s boundless future, the Cité Gagarine housing project—named after the first man to travel into space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—in suburban Paris eventually fell victim to the unstoppable changing of the times, resulting in an extended demolition starting in 2019.
Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s Gagarine is set in the anxious period leading up to the complex’s demolition, when its low-income, mostly immigrant residents are forced to relocate. Events concerning Cité Gagarine’s vast and diverse community unfold through the eyes of one bighearted (and tellingly named) resident, Youri (Alseni Bathily), but this yoking of the narrative to a single character’s perspective proves to be both a blessing and a curse.
Youri possess a sociability and an immense kindness that fuels a need to help his neighbors, whether they appreciate it or not. Youri’s compassion for others is also an extension of Liatard and Trouilh’s own empathy for their characters. Youri’s interactions with others is integral to the filmmakers’ naturalistic, unsentimental snapshot of life within the Cité Gagarine, with each glimpse becoming a piece in a multifaceted mosaic of a marginalized community.
But Gagarine’s moving depiction of community doesn’t marry well with its whimsy-tinged magical realism. While the Cité Gagarine’s residents—including Youri’s crush, Diana (Lyna Khoudri)—move out, Youri stays behind alone as a result of problems with his flaky mother. Youri subsequently transforms his apartment to resemble a space shuttle, and during this stretch the film gives itself over to elaborate dream sequences in which Youri imagines himself as, in the spirit of his namesake, an astronaut on a ship in outer space.
The overly protracted length of these scenes, though, does little more than give Gagarine a meandering and dramatically inert quality. And while the visuals are striking, they’re unable to distract from the clumsily explicit nature with which the filmmakers offer up the dream sequences as an allegory of their main character’s isolation from society.
Youri’s solitude is eventually broken when he reconnects with Diana, which also results in the filmmakers placing the focus back on the now-displaced former residents of the Cité Gagarine. At one point, Youri, Diana, and Dali (Finnegan Oldfield) hold an impromptu dance party in Youri’s apartment, complete with Dali doing the impression of a whirling dervish. Not only does this moment give Gagarine a much-needed spark of life, it also underlines the fact that the film is at its most effective and engaging when capturing the vibrancy of a world onto its own rather than elaborately aestheticizing the world of one character’s imagination.
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