My First Highway (2016)

Directed by: Kevin Meul | 86 minutes | drama | Actors: Natali Broods, Ruth Becquart, Victor Solé, Romy Lauwers, Aaron Roggeman, Mathias Sercu

A lot can change for a teenager in one summer holiday, nobody needs to elaborate on that. Rob de Nijs did. “Like a man he saw the sun rise again,” he sang about his first love in the 1970s. This initiation rite is tantalizingly depicted in ‘My First Highway’, for which director Kevin Meul wrote the screenplay himself. The languid Spanish summer is for Benjamin (Aaron Roggeman) with a flax mustache one moment washing dishes at the campsite, and the next an existential drama, because he has just shot someone after a joyride with holiday sweetheart Annabel (Romy Louise Lauwers) .

We jump from one piece to the next, as in most teenage summers. We’re not going to call it coming-of-age, that’s marketing for adults. But Benjamin does have a conscience; his perception has been altered by the apparently accidental, violent event. This has been subtly designed by Meul: in slow motion images of romping teenagers on the beach, which are observed by the main character, Meul shows that life is suddenly no longer a game for ‘Benji’. It’s never been a game for Annabel; she has confessed a secret that leads to the chain of events.

Although ‘My First Highway’ could have been edited better (why a masturbation scene twice?), the atmosphere of life’s most important summer is captured well. The strength of the film is Roggeman’s strong play and the chemistry with Lauwers (‘Life is vurrukkulluk’). It is neat chemistry; awkwardness, manipulation and indifference alternate in the movements of these teenagers. As it should. At the end we are one murder and one assault further, and a mush of illusions poorer. Depicted by Meul as an exemplary teenage summer that ends catastrophically in the back of Mom and Dad’s car.