The European exchange student, so often a cheaply targeted figure of fun in American high school comedies, gets the leading point of view in “I’ll Be Gone in June,” an intelligent, vividly evocative coming-of-age portrait from promising German freshman director Katharina Rivilis. Following the perspective-shifting travails of a 16-year-old from small-town Germany as she’s deposited in even smaller-town New Mexico for a year, the film covers much expected territory as she grapples with first love, first sex and adolescent social hierarchies — but it’s most compelling on more political matters, given that its protagonist’s year away happens to begin in the summer of 2021, shortly before the 9/11 attacks.
As such, “I’ll Be Gone in June” deftly transcends its personal end-of-innocence framework to capture a whole country in shellshocked, sometimes ugly transition — with the prickliest aspects of patriotism and American exceptionalism suddenly exposed to the European outsider. Rivilis’ film loses its grip slightly when its focus drifts, less interestingly, to an all-consuming, heart-bruising romance, depicted in heavily lyrical, lilac-hued strokes. But it’s an auspicious and impressively particular debut, among the most distribution-ready standouts in this year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard program. Its seductive, semi-stylized dreaminess recalls two other German snapshots of the great American nowhere, Percy Adlon’s “Bagdad Café” and Wim Wenders‘ “Paris, Texas” — the latter filmmaker’s influence especially palpable, given his involvement here as a producer.
